Aust set an example to world? Are you kidding. We are setting an example, how a devotion to an ideal allows a nation to dig its own grave.

Now what is the US and EU doing? The exact opposite to what this author suggests.

Now I know the situation is complicated, as both sides have their strengths and weaknesses, but I want the CIS or IPA to show me how their ideas will actually help Aust achieve a better production-consumption balance without decimating the social fabric of this nation.

I expect I will be always waiting, because the centre-right is just as naïve as the centre-left in claiming to know the answers.

That is why the Coalition will only partly listen to the ideas of the iPA and CIS because reality is much more complicated.

I agree with Chris Lewis's comment. The author doesn't understand much about trade or economics. For a start sea trade burns a most noxious fuel and this cause a substantial number of deaths per year. It puts more sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere each year than all cars.

I repeat below what I posted on another discussion today.

Towards the end of WW2 Chifley and his cabinet decided that infrastructure and productive industries needed to expand to provide employment for returning servicemen and for the refugees likely to arrive from a devestated Europe.

The Snowy Scheme was started as was other major infrastructure such as power plants and the expansion of communications. Factory development was encouraged for the production of cars, trucks, trains and other rolling stock, and whitegoods etc. Apart from a blip under Menzies in the early sisties Australia enjoyed a properous 25 years.

Metal production and industrial production is essential for security purposes yet we have lost most of the industries which provide the base load for the steel industry (white goods, fabrication, rolling stock, vehicles). The USA was so successful in WW2 because of its stock of machine tools and factories. Some Ford Motor plants were converted to producing one Liberator (a four engine bomber) every hour. Japan and Germany could not compete!

Once the steel industry has no base load we will be back to being boundary riders on the squatter's fences, a situation I first described at AC45 at the Australian Administrative Staff College in 1972. Then, I was arguing that adequate tariffs were needed to ensure continuation of essential industries. What has changed?

Now too many people are employed in such non-industries as banking and superannuation.

The problems of the future cannot be solved by having a pile of funds. They can only be solved by having a sustainable current account position, which includes have other assets, much like Norway does, as replacements for the natural assets now being exported, and by having the infrastructure and the industries that can efficiently supply the goods and essential services necessary at that future time.

The previous two posts sum up the obvious...this fellow is typical of the bureaucrats and academics who live on the assumption that their modelling data (imaginary though it is) will give a factual result just because they have an end result that they have matched the data to achieve...too bad that real life doesn't work that way!

With our primary industries being choked to death with quality controls and government imposed charges that none of our competitor nations contend with...his arguments on 'competitiveness' fail miserably. Our manufacturing industries have dropped from some of the most productive and sound in the world, to it's lowest level (other than Greece!) in the developed world...nothing to be proud of achieving there either.

Take a look at the rate of suicide in rural Australia...hang your collective heads in shame that our primary industries are being gutted by greedy political agenda and a banking system more corrupt than our halls of power are proving to be. (refer Storm fiasco, etc.

Meg1

The usual definition of primary industry includes mining as well as manufacturing, and the mining sector is doing very well at the moment. Indeed, one of the problems the agricultural industry faces in the high dollar that the mining boom has created.

I know that our farmers are doing it tough at the moment, but how on earth could a return to the "good old days" of protectionism be good for them? Not only would it add to input costs (inputs like fertiliser and tractors would be more expensive) but it would also reduce demand for their products if other countries protect their industries against our exports.

The only argument in favour of anti-dumping rules is to protect against the international equivalent of predatory pricing, where a foreign producer sells below costs in order to destroy domestic competition with the intention of increasing prices once the competition is eliminated. That is extremely rare for internationally traded goods and services, because in a competitive market someone else will replace the displaced supplier.

Otherwise, if foreign governments or businesses want to subsidise Australian consumers, why should we stop them?

Foyle has given important details of the disaster brought about by the accession of the Hawke-Keating Government in 1983. As trade-led poliical relationships with slave countries like Indonesia and later China were progressively strengthened, industry after industry joined the initially slow but accelerating conveyor belt to the drain through free trade agreements which set up the slave countries as competitors with our community in a race to the most debased industrial and social and environmental conditions in the world.

Treasurer Paul Keating brought about an explosion of privatisation/foreignisation of key public assets aqnd ceding oif controls over imports which hasn't ceased, gutting Australia's manufacturing industry (including cars). Global big business were so overjoyed they called Keating "the world's greatest treasurer". Praise from the architects of the 2007 Global Financial Heist!

Only by reversing the Keating/Howard/Rudd/Gillard/Swan "reforms" can Australia start to restore hard-won Australian wages, conditions, environmental protection, public welfare and (most important of all) national economic and political independence.

[The sorry story of Australia’s long decline in control of its imports is detailed, without evaluative comment, in a major report b y Melbourne University Professor Peter Lloyd which can be read at http://www.economics.unimelb.edu.au/downloads/wpapers-07/1023.pdf]

Rhian, this suggestion that other govts subsidise their own production which benefits us for buying cheap products needs to be elaborated upon in regard to demonstrating how our own production-consumption balance improves against the huge advantages now being gained by corrupt and mercantile nations.

I ask the CIS and IPA and anyone else to demonstrate this.

I think it is time that all thinktanks lift their game, not just centre-left.

Emperor Julian, I cant open link.