The following comment posted, recently to a forum at http://candobetter.org/node/434#comment-854, may be of interest.

Further comments, by either anonymous or registered users, are welcome.

A BETTER FORM OF PROTECTION?

The argument against tariffs has always been that they lead to anti-competitive situations - especially in countries with smaller populations like Australia. A manufacturer sets up behind the protective wall of tariffs. Wages and conditions are protected but the manufacturer achieves monopoly status simply because Australia doesn't have the population to support the kind of competition that can be achieved on a global scale.

On the other hand, unrestricted free trade pitches Australian workers into a race to the bottom against slave labour countries, as writers on this site (http://candobetter.org) have pointed out. But at least we get competition. So the story goes.

Well, at the risk of sounding like the Mexican girl on the Taco ad; Why can't we have both? Or the benefits of both anyway, without the disadvantages?

What about a system where tariffs were applied on a sliding scale depending on the wages and conditions prevalent in the country of manufacture? So goods mostly manufactured in Norway attract a 0% tariff, whereas those manufactured in any place where subsistence wages apply attract the top rate? A medium rate could apply to countries where wages and conditions were moderate. The ILO could be the arbiter.

Such a system would provide bigger markets in which genuine competition could flourish, among true equals. The incentive to move manufacturing to low wage countries would be killed stone dead. If the system were sophisticated enough, companies in low wage countries paying higher wages could apply for special status, recognising their better treatment of their workers and rewarding that with favourable tariff status.

Given that the protection vs free trade debate is common to all developed countries where workers enjoy a reasonable standard of living, I think this notion would find support around the world. It's a concept worth thinking through in more detail.

Daggett, I will keep saying it, as long as you keep repeating your
crapola that Australian manufacturing needs to hide behind tariffs
to pay reasonable wages.

I remind you that if wages were the only issue, then most of our
imports would come from low wage countries and they don't. We
buy around 27 billion $ worth of stuff from China, but we buy
23.7billion $ worth of stuff from the US, another 17 billion$
worth from Japan, then another whole huge amount from Europe.
Add them up and our imports from low wage countries are small
in comparison.

Australia is far too small a country to try and make everything,
so best we let others make things at which we are not very good
at. Best to buy from countries that buy from us and China is
a great customer, taking over 22 billion $ worth of stuff.
The US and EU are far worse customers and yes the EU still protect
their agricultural sector with huge tariffs. What would be fair
would be to tax all their goods at the rate that they tax ours.

Consumers are the big winners from low tariffs and why you want
to slug poor people more for their consumer goods, beats me.

I'll tell you who benefits from going to Target etc to buy cheap
clothes for their kids, it is the poor, not the rich

Yabby claims he is entitled to go on repeating ad infinitum his own arguments without regard to evidence which does not support his case. If everyone adopted that attitude, there is no possible way that any of the discussions of contentious topics on Online Opinion could ever progress.

To me this is further confirmation that Yabby is not here to help others gain an understanding of the issue at hand, rather he is using his account on OLO precisely to prevent others gaining that understanding through excessive repetition, red herrings, personal attacks and other debaters' tricks. So, as in the case of the previous forum in regard to "Housing affordability squeezed by speculators" (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6697#101073) a straightforward discussion, which should have ended after no more than 50 entries at most, was bloated to a ridiculous 263 entries. Only the most determined and persistent will now be able to glean the useful knowledge contained in that discussion from the cacophonous background Yabby helped to create.

Unless Yabby is mad, he can only be doing this because either he has a personal vested interest in maintaining a situation which is against the public interest, or because he is being paid to do so.

---

I see that Yabby has, unusually for him, added some new points to the discussion, although most are hardly original. I will respond to them, even though I realise I stand almost no chance of having Yabby acknowledge any of this further down the track.

Yabby wrote "I remind you that if wages were the only issue."

Who said that wages were the only issue?

Your comparative statistics of imports from slave-wage economies vs non-slave-wage economies are hardly complete. Why no mention of imports from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Phillipines, India, Malaysia, Latin America etc? Even if the figures stand, they don't alter the point that Australia's manufacturing sector has largely been destroyed by the export of jobs to those countries as the recent export of jobs by Fisher and Paykel shows.

Yabby wrote, "Australia is far too small a country to try and make everything,"

(tobecontinued)

*through excessive repetition, red herrings, personal attacks and other debaters'
tricks.*

ROFL Daggett, sounds like the story of your life on OLO :)

*Unless Yabby is mad, he can only be doing this because either he has a personal vested interest in
maintaining a situation which is against the public interest, or because he is being paid to do so.*

The public is on my side Daggett, that’s why they vote liberal or labor, not for some
party who wants to turn Australia into something like Cuba, as you do. Look around
you, people on average are doing better then ever before, are richer then ever before
and have more opportunities then ever before. Innovation happens when people have
freedom to innovate, as we do, not when Govts dictate everything, as you would want. The real danger is that people like you would ever get a say in Govt, it would
be a disaster for the country. But Australians are too smart for that, thankfully.

So what if Fisher and Paykel close? We are that short of labour that we can’t even
find enough truck drivers in Australia.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s2229140.htm

Meantime new industries create new jobs.

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/200804/s2230095.htm

The world keeps changing, get used to it. Many people prefer to work in service
industries, rather then on a production line. Our meat industry is screaming for
manufacturing workers, there are few takers.

Mobile phones, the internet, PCs, software creation etc, all industries that have
created new jobs which did not exist 20 years ago. You want to go back to
making Australian toasters etc and slugging consumers heaps for them, for no
good reason. Think again.

Yes I quoted our main trading partners, stuck to the big figures. You are free
to fartass around with the little figures, if that floats your boat.

Personally, I'm not too worried about Aussies making overpriced toasters again. And it'd be a (convenient) mistake to characterise all opposition to unrestrained free trade as an attempt to build up industry in Australia behind a protective wall of indiscriminate tariffs.

If a non-Australian company has some really cool technology that allows it to make good toasters for 50c each, observing proper environmental practices and paying their staff great wages - good luck to them. They should flog all comers in the market and probably will. I'd happily buy such a toaster - whether it was made in Australia or not. I think a lot of Aussies would buy one.

What I object to is companies making toasters for 50c by paying subsistence wages to their workers and getting away with environmental crapulence. It's hypocritical, in my opinion, for Australians to buy 'cheap' products made under conditions they wouldn't tolerate in their own backyards. Made cheaply by externalising costs (environmental and social) in ways that wouldn't be allowed here.

Aside from these issues, the phenomena of offshoring to low wage countries undermines the technological progress that drives real productivity growth. It's easier and probably cheaper to relocate a manufacturing outfit to a low wage country than it is to do the R&D that might (just might..) result in a far more efficient way of making a product.

.

(continuedfromabove)

Yabby wrote, "Australia is far too small a country to try and make everything,"

As I already wrote in my very first contribution to this discussion(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7218#111687), Australia, with a population of only 7 million was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world in 1942.

Perhaps we didn't manufacture quite 'everything' back then, but we came very close and were self-reliant enough to cause the Japanese Army to veto the Navy's plans to invade in March 1942 (i.e. even before the Battle of the Coral Sea). Back then Australia had developed world-leading aviation, shipbuilding, armaments, electronics and telecommunications manufacturing capacities in addition to the capacity to supply domestic consumer goods. It would have been no accident that one of the first computers in the world was built and operated in Australia in the early 1950's before it was scrapped.

As I have said before, that has been largely lost as a result of the adoption of the globalised free-market economic policies which Yabby supports.

---

Yabby wrote, "So what if Fisher and Paykel close? We are that short of labour that we can’t even find enough truck drivers in Australia. ..."

Yabby seems to be arguing here that truck driving, timber harvesting, in addition to a minuscule number of specialised manufacturing jobs are a satisfactory alternative to the wholesale loss of skilled manufacturing jobs of which the closure of Fisher & Paykel is but one example.

I already responded earlier (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7218#111387) to Yabby's hysterical hyperbole about how shortages of labour are supposedly crippling our economy:

"If some sectors of the economy ... don't have the necessary workers and are suffering as a consequence, then the Government should not have allowed this situation to develop in the first place. They should have simply acted to slow down the rate of extraction of our mineral resources and housing development at least until the needs of these industries could have been met without harming other sectors of our economy, or they should have properly funded training."