Thanks for the comments and three quick points.
1) Media commentary since I wrote this opinion last Thursday would seem to offer some general support to the points that I made as well as revealing some interesting further information.
2) Scepticism about the strength of our position seems to be shared by your online opinions so far. I am particularly interested in your ideas on which aspects deserve to be more fully built out.
3) As regard the World Competitiveness Yearbook 2006 rankings, the 57th trade ranking is on factor 1.2.18 Trade to GDP ratio. This is calculated as half(exports+imports)/GDP. The overall subfactor breakdown for international trade is 54th. I took the factor reported by the ABC and CEDA but yes the overall 54th might be better use. CEDA provides the 4 page Australian factor breakdown at http://ceda.com.au/public/publications/wcy/yearbook_2006.html. The "Competitiveness landscape" graph (p70)highlights how poor the trade competitivenss aspect is, which was the point I was trying to reinforce.
Over to you.

If countries ever stop buying our "holes in the ground" we will be faced with a great deal of nothing. Do we export anything besides 'dirt'?
When the next election comes around,many pensioners are going to recall that though they pay big taxes on most things they buy, they were totally overlooked in the Budget.
Pensioners do exist and they do vote.

The latest Federal budget is the most wonderful budget since the one presented in 1977 by the Premier of Queensland, the Honourable Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, KCMG, in which death duties were abolished.

At last, at long last, the federal government is addressing the basic problem that Australia faces, our mountain of private foreign debt. Have exercised financial prudence and paid off the government foreign debt, it has now set the policy settings in place that can lead to us doing the same with our private debt.

For far too long in this country the disciples of Keynes have made sure that it did not pay to save. By taxing nominal income from investments instead of real income, and allowing nominal deductions of interest instead of real interest, they ensured that we would build up the mountain of debt that we currently face. With the likelihood that we will face a deflationary downturn, when debtors will be crushed, any efforts to correct this cannot come to soon. The only way to correct a mountain of debt is to create a mountain of saving. From the national point of view, it doesn't matter too much who does the saving, as long as it is done. As the rich are the ones with the greatest ability to save, they are the ones who need the incentive.

There are two ways to achieve saving; you can force people or encourage them. The Labor party's solution was to force people to do something that it did not pay them to do. The problem with this is that people would only save the amount they were forced to. The non-labor way is to encourage them, and this will produce a much better result.

Is it too much to hope that I will live to see the final deliverance from the nightmare vestiges of socialism? These of course would be the end of capital taxation, the end of income taxation, and last of all, (something for which we may have to wait until our Chinese friends dominate international finance) the restoration of the Gold Standard.