You're dead on Yabby, but don't forget bureaucracy, bureaucracy is becoming the number one killer of industry in Australia, we need to get the bureaucrats out of our faces!

I don't care anymore anyway. I sold a successful manufacturing business that exported to 6 countries about 12 years ago when cheap Chinese goods were coming in by the shipload. Copies of our very own products (they're so good at it they even copied our faults) But you know - it wasn't even that that made me sell, it was bureaucracy, I was and still am over it. They, the bureaucrats can rot in their crappy imports for all I care.

My business is still running but is now an import from Indonesia, which is now a cost to us instead of an income, waydago bureaucrats!

If you don't get the bureaucrats (Poly-Ticks) out of small business's faces, you've got no hope!

This sums it up beautifully. It's American, but the same applies here!

This is why there are no jobs in America (And soon to be Australia)
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=195493

Ah Rehctub, that is easy to say, for you who are rich!

Now that's a cheap shot yabby.

BTW, I am not rich. I may have a few assetts, but you want to try running a small business these days and see just how rich one 'can't be' any more.

Now as for your comment on Germany. Guess what, they also made most of the machines that were once used to manufacture quality goods.

Many have now been replaced by cheap, almost slave labour.

When I was a kid leaving school, mid 70's, I just wanted to be a butcher.

Now if I couldn't find my 'dream job', I could have been an electrician, or, I could have chosen from any of ten or so factories for low skilled work.

Those options are now gone in less than 40 years.

Now iof we can't stop the cheap imports, than the best solution I can come up with is to put a huge excise on our resourses, much like we pay for fuels.

This would be far better than the proposed mining tax, as the end user pays, not the job creators or the risk takers.

After all, what other options do our resourses customers really have.

The reality we face today is that our population is increasing and our potential for creating tax revenue is decreasing.

We are buring the candle from both ends.

rehctub.
"The reality we face today is that our population is increasing and our potential for creating tax revenue is decreasing."

That is true.

I was doing cleaning many years ago, and we cleaned a number of government offices, including an office of taxation auditors.

Some of these offices are quite luxurious, but not a single thing in them was purchased from Australia.

The same is now for schools and universities, and many of these government employees and academics have not the slightest interest in purchasing anything from Australian companies.

However government departments and the education system can be used to help kick start Australian industry, as long as it is tied to their budgets and hip pocket.

If they want to purchase something with taxpayer funding, they have to demonstrably show that they have been proactive in searching out Australian companies who make that product, and in providing feedback to those companies.

If the government departments, schools and universities don’t do that, then they don’t get the money to buy the product.

They don’t have to buy Australian products, but they have to be proactive in searching for Australian companies, and providing feedback to those companies.

With feedback, Australian companies can develop their products, and start and export them, but at present I don’t know of any government employees or teachers who have any interest in providing feedback to Australian companies. Their only interest is in getting as much from the taxpayer as possible.

I'm pretty sure they still do this, vanna.

>>If they want to purchase something with taxpayer funding, they have to demonstrably show that they have been proactive in searching out Australian companies who make that product, and in providing feedback to those companies<<

But the process is loaded, as I discovered when I first ran a business here, back in the eighties.

On the one hand, they would welcome an Australian bid, and point to all the hurdles that an overseas company would have to clear in order to show their support for the local economy.

Then they would explain that they were duty-bound to take the lowest bid anyway, to make the best use of the taxpayers' money.

This effectively meant that we were actively discouraged from even starting the bid process, given that it was immensely time-consuming (i.e. expensive) and inevitably favoured the large multinational. Who, quite often, had more staff working on the "we support the Aussie economy" section than in our entire company.

As for feedback. Would you have time to listen to a government bureaucrat telling you how to run a business? Thought not.

At the time, I felt that we were being badly served by the government purchasing process. But the cold reality was - and still is - that we do not have the raw material (education, infrastructure etc.) to build sustainable, world-class businesses here in Australia. Anything more complex than digging up stuff and flogging it, that is.

We have some of the worst business managers in the world, but pay them as if they were world class (there are a few significant exceptions to this, but only enough to prove the rule), and some of the most wasteful business practices.

Trouble is, we've never really had to work that hard. This became abundantly clear during the nineties, when I spent a fair amount of time doing business in Europe and the Far East.

Compared to the Chinese and the Germans, we were coasting while they were putting their backs into it.

Now we are reaping the rewards.

Pericles
The ultimate aim should be to develop more exports.

Depending on the product, the Australian population may be too small to support more than a few Australian manufacturers of that product.

So the manufactures have to develop the product in Australia, and then head for the export market. To sell on the export market, the product has to be unique or better in some way than what is available. IE. it has to be innovative.

It is found the best means of developing innovation is with feedback from the consumer regards the product.

So, government departments in particular have to be pro-active in providing constructive feedback. I do know of government employess and some teachers who purposely provided false feedback to an Australian company, and their feedback may not be reliable, but we cannot continue to have so many government employees and teachers who simply feed from the system, and provide less and less back to the public in time.

I absolutely agree, 100% vanna.

>>The ultimate aim should be to develop more exports.<<

The point I was trying to make was that as a country, we are fundamentally ill-suited to doing just that.

China's exports began the same way as post-war Japan and Germany's. Labour-intensive, low margin everyday products. They progressed over the next thirtyfive years to serious electronics and heavy engineering, requiring an educated workforce and a supportive government structure.

During the same period, we were living "off the sheep's back". We developed some industry, but none that was close to the "elaborate transformation" that creates the highest amount of added value. As a result, we became content to ship out raw materials, and ship in finished goods.

Significantly, this was also a time where we gradually freed ourselves from the tariff protections that had been implemented across the twentieth century. By the time our industry was exposed to the economic reality of the rest of the world, it became obvious that the lifelong featherbedding had rendered it incapable of competing.

Sadly, nothing much has changed. Every unfavourable economic wind exposes us to the awareness that we simply don't have the native talent to invent and create.

Or even manage.

A friend who works in one of our major export industries (education), presently undergoing a massive downturn in enrolments, explained it to me in these terms...

"It was as if we had built a business that could only survive in the good times. The minute enrolments started to drop, we found that we had no management mechanism to evaluate and implement an appropriate business response. Everyone just sat around like stunned mullets. It was when someone said 'so what is the government going to do about it' that I realized we were doomed."

They specifically asked not to be identified. Which is another really bad sign.

Unfortunately, with a government whose ministerial competence extends to lawyers and unionists, but not to business, this is unlikely to change. Hence my rampant pessimism.