If it looks like socialism and smells like socialism, it must be socialism.

Protectionism is socialism.

Good article.
Will "full employment" ever be possible given the increasing substitution of technology for labour and the competition from overseas where labour is very cheap? The assumption that "full employment" (which today includes both parents and older folks) is possible or desirable needs to be questioned.
As the article shows, our productive industries have been crippled at the expense of profitable, yet ultimately parasitical industries.
A whole generation has been sold on making profits from inflation, not realising that income without work must ultimately be paid for...by someone, somewhere. Fast easy wealth is a nice gig to be in, but any get-rich-quick-without-work process should not be lauded as anything less than easy money scams.
Meanwhile our irreplaceable national assets such as minerals and farmlands are being sold to overseas interests faster than governments can keep up. Unions are lost: they cannot make public traction even in an era when corporate spin flips from "skills crisis" to "job losses" from month to month depending on the issue being attacked.
Setting the cost of money using a secretive bunch of industry insiders is a sick joke: it seems that free markets and price setting are only for the poor: finance gets to rig the market for it's benefit and no-one seems to mind this!
Sadly, our political system is also broken with bipartisan policy dead and the media encouraging hype and misinformation. I fear that we will ultimately be forced to change by the government that buys us or conquers us: We certainly are not showing any signs of mature enlightened leadership, and empowered individuals are getting rarer as the parasites reap from the younger gens.

Everything in the author’s article hinges on this proposition, which is incorrect.
“Theoretically, [neo-classical economics] implies that a flexible labour market will adjust the wage rate so that the existing production base employs all those willing to work. … The philosophy does not recognise involuntary unemployment such as occurred during the. Because the full employment assumption excludes involuntary unemployment, neoclassical theory cannot provide a solution when it occurs.”

It’s not correct because neoclassical theory is a theory of the unhampered market, in which real wage rates rise during a boom, and fall during a recession. But the unemployment in the economic depressions the author refers to, is because governments in support of unions actively prevent real wage rates from falling.

“How then can the Keynesian case arise? … In only two ways: (1) if people voluntarily agree with the unions, which insist that no one be employed at lower than the old money wage rate. … [T]he unions’ raising of real wage rates causes unemployment. But this unemployment is *voluntary*, since the workers acquiesce in the imposition of a higher minimum real wage rate, below which they will not undercut the union and accept unemployment. Or (2) unions or government coercively impose the minimum wage rate. But this is an aexample of a *hampered* market, not the free market …. "
Rothbard “Man, Economy and State” at p.781
http://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF

Therefore the author’s original statement is incorrect, and since everything that follows in his article hinges on it, the entire argument fails.

To talk of the need for government to promote full employment while coercively preventing it is obviously self-contradictory.

And to talk of government ensuring rising living standards while they are actively promoting an agenda – ‘sustainability’ – which is opposed to it is also self-contradictory.

And any talk of government managing the economy is simply a cover for more of the policy of permanent inflation which has caused the economic depressions the author refers to, and now wants to cure with more of the same monetary snake-oil that caused the problems in the first place.

Sorry, my quote of the author omitted part of a sentence the whole of which should read:
"The philosophy does not recognise involuntary unemployment such as occurred during the Great Depression, 1970’s-1990’s, or, the GFC."

Sure Free Trade has its faults but so too has Protectionism.

Protected industries have a huge political risk attached to them. The industrialist wishing to invest in new equipment knows that a change in government policy could destroy his viability. This enhanced risk often results in a failure to invest in new technology which in turn makes the protected industry even less competitive.

A failure to invest in new technology is the death knell to manufacturing.

Wattle,
Technology means nothing if your stock supply runs out. An oil refinery can have the latest technology, and then the oil wells run out.

Free trade basically means multinationals, who do have a habit of using up a country's resources and then moving on to the next country.

All looks good in the short term because their share prices remain high or are increasing.