To the Honourable President and members of the Senate in Parliament assembled:
The petition of the undersigned shows: (state grievance or subject of complaint)
That in the increasingly uncertain global financial circumstances, Australians are very concerned about the financial stability of the Commonwealth of Australia and the counter-party risk associated with holding national assets in financially distressed countries like the UK that have an increasingly negative credit rating outlook. We are concerned that the increasingly loose monetary policies of international Central Banks, such as Zero Interest Rate Policies and Quantitative Easing are debasing their respective currencies and are:
1) Impacting the Australian currency by raising its comparative value and reducing the international competitiveness of our export industries and labour markets;
2) Undermining the basis of trust in the international currency regime that has been the historic hallmark of the affluence of developed economies since the Second World War, while growing international tensions;
3) Increasingly seeing developing nations seeking to protect the wealth realised in their development by diversifying their foreign currency reserves through active accumulation initiatives of gold by their central banks. These countries are reported to include China, Russia, India, South Korea, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, Columbia, Argentina and Azerbaijan;
4) Forcing both mature and emerging nations to prudently repatriate their national gold reserves from the historical financial centres of London and New York back to their own soil in increasing numbers. Countries reported to have or are undertaking such repatriation efforts include Germany, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Romania, Azerbaijan, Libya and Iran;
5) Increasingly seeing concerned citizens of nations around the globe petition their governments to audit and account for their gold reserves. Countries with such initiatives include USA, Netherlands, Switzerland and Australia;
6) Seeing the international investment strategies hedging the risk of devaluing global currencies by investing in agricultural and industrial commodities, precious metals and other tangible assets that will push inflationary effects into the real economy; and
7) Increasing the likelihood that an alternate international reserve currency will be adopted to replace the US dollar, which will be wholly or partially backed by gold as a necessity for restoring confidence in an independent reference of value. Reported potential alternatives include the SDR of the IMF and the Chinese national currency.
Your petitioners ask that the Senate: (state the action required)
Establish initiatives for the Commonwealth of Australia to:
a) Remove the conflict of interest of the Reserve Bank of Australia between its role as national gold custodian and issuer of the national currency, by transferring the role of National Gold Custodian to the Treasury of the Commonwealth of Australia in Canberra.
b) Repatriate its gold reserves from London back to Australia to be held on Australian soil; and
c) Begin an ongoing program of accumulating gold reserves, considering the efficiency of collecting taxes payable from precious metal mining companies in the refined metals they extract as a means of adding to those reserves.
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(To be collected by electronic petition)
