Rhian, perhaps you’d like to list countries which have...‘pulled itself out of severe poverty in recent years’ WITH ‘trade and international investment being important contributors to growth.’

Australia’s so-called FREE trade agreements are simply opening foreign access to our markets with little or no quality control and significantly cheaper input costs, while our own farmers and manufacturers, etc. are stringently regulated to produce quality goods for the domestic and overseas markets. A clear contradiction to any ‘level playing field’…or legitimate ‘competition’.

Australia’s balance of trade figures contradict your assertion that it has been of benefit here…we have lost all but a skeleton remnant of our manufacturing industry (only Greece has a smaller manufacturing base in the developed world) and our farming sector is being squeezed into penury trying to compete against EU, US, Japanese and Chinese agricultural subsidies.

Your ‘internal’ shipping claim regarding the creation of jobs is also a furphy – many overseas corporations do little direct transacting in this country, importing much of their requirements and their workforce (on limited contract) and paying them in their country of origin. These workers include many areas from beef and agricultural industry workers right through to sex workers.

1995 ___ 2,368
1996 ___ 2,393 up
1997 ___ 2,720 up
1998 ___ 2,683 down
1999 ___ 2,492 down
2000 ___ 2,363 down
2001 ___ 2,454 up
2002 ___ 2,320 down
2003 ___ 2,213 down
2004 ___ 2,098 down
2005 ___ 2,101 up – where does 2006 go?

While the figures from 1995 to 2005 have decreased overall…the suicide figures:

1. Do not include many ‘accidental’ deaths which were suspicious but could not be confirmed as suicides despite strong suggestion that was the case.

2. Do not include figures for the decades prior to 1995, which would provide evidence that the present trade and NCP policies have impacted significantly and detrimentally in those areas which they have been introduced into.

3. Are not broken into the areas relative to the impact of NCP and trade distorting policies being introduced…e.g, dairy industry deregulation…and the resultant suicides, sugar industry…and the resultant suicides, pork, etc.

(tbc…)

(Cont…)

4. The figures you have produced are, at best, a guesstimate…they are inaccurate and are NOT a true reflection of the national figures.

5. ABARE figures are not regarded in agricultural and industry circles as providing accurate figures in research…because they haven’t in the past.

6. Nothing to do with ‘preconceptions’ Rhian…doctors cannot cure a patient who dies from suspected suicide, but they will seldom list the death as suicide unless there is absolute certainty, to spare the family any further grief. Welfare agencies have reported incidents of callers to ‘help’ lines enquiring whether (specifically identified) ‘accidental’ deaths would be paid out in insurance claims…while the incidents of those deaths rose during that period.

7. Usage of anti-depressant drugs (particularly attributed to the impact of globalization in its localized forms, i.e., NCP and deregulation, etc.) is continuing to rise at an alarming rate...so too are stress related heart complications...in those areas.

8. Government ‘packages’ designed to gloss over the effects of NCP, deregulation, etc. once introduced…invariably contain significant funding for counseling – specifically, suicide and loss.

As Fozz rightly says, trade is being seen as an ‘end in itself’, to be pursued at any cost…irrespective of the negative effects of such trade.

Whatever happened to the triple bottom line…number 3 got lost somewhere out there in cyberspace for most of the community.

Meg, you may well be right that suicide is under-reported. But for the downward trend to be misleading it would have to be more under-reported nowadays than it was a decade ago, and there’s no reason to believe that’s the case.

Probably the greatest success in reducing poverty in the past few decades has been in Asia. Counties that have escaped poverty in the course of two generations include Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Taipei, and South Korea. Countries that are still poor by our standards, but have raised their living standards from well below to well above average, include Indonesia, China, India, Nepal, Malaysia and Thailand. In all of these countries, trade and foreign investoment were significant contributors to growth.

Taking up the point raise above, about income alone being sometime inadequate for measuring welfare in poor economies, I’ve taken these data from the UN's Human Development Index, which combines real per capita GDP with life expectancy and literacy to generate a broader development indicator than GDP alone.

http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/10.html

You doubt that ABARE can count Australia agricultural exports. But the National Farmers’ Federation seems happy to quote their numbers, saying rather proudly that “Australia exports a massive 64% (in volume) of total agricultural production. In terms of value, this represents around 75% of the total gross value of Australian agricultural production”

http://www.nff.org.au/farm-facts.html

Rhian please do not quote the NFF (known in farming circles as No Family Farms) as representative of farming families interests...they are a political pawn group, designed to support the policies of government irrespective of the detrimental effects on the farmers they are supposedly representing. Take a look at the other things they have supported for confirmation.

Like other bodies with unsurprisingly similar composition on their boards, the board members seem more intent on keeping their overpaid positions than on achieving anything for their membership.

As for ABARE and NFF figures...you neglected to mention how much in real $value that volume of export has shrunk by for agricultural products over the past decade, century...even year!

Statistics, damned lies and statistics...you can selectively choose the few, distort them and make them change from muddy grey to white, can't you? Why let the truth get in the way of a dubious tale, it's worked against the majority who are getting poorer while the minority get richer up until now, hasn't it?