Well, I sure hope you didn't hold your breath waiting for Cartman to respond, Billie.

Judging from his earlier posts, my guess is that he would have been all for cashing in on Japanese armaments manufacturing boom of the 1930's with the export of Australian pig iron.

Had he been around then, with his unique brand of pseudo-pragmatism and sophistry, Cartman would have been the most noisy of Pig Iron Bob's supporters. And with compulsive consistency, he would have simultaneously applauded the embargo on oil and rubber that forced Japan to abandon the invasion of China, and invade Indonesia and Malaya in order to save Japan's industry base. His motivation would have been the same as that of the Seppo's and Pom's; not being able to stomach a "Yellow Race" being the world's 6th largest industrial state (which it was then). No doubt Cartman still believes that Japan bombed Darwin on route to Sydney.

In fact, I don't completely accept the popular left-wing view that portrays the Conservative inter-war governments in which Menzies served as appeasers of fascism and sycophantic servants of British commercial and strategic interests. Whilst I think that the then Attorney General Menzies' actions in the Pig Iron dispute were morally questionable, to attribute them purely to a desire to appease the Japanese militarists is not consistent with the way his Government capably prepared this country for the war with Japan as Andrew Ross has shown. I have written more of this in an article "How to make sense of the 'Pig Iron Bob' dispute?" at http://candobetter.org/node/457 in case anyone may be interested.

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Also, I have reposted some of the comments made above about the supposed skills crisis to : http://candobetter.org/node/447#comment-865 in response to a brief article "Skilled migrants causing problems". If that is not OK with anyone, please let me know. Further comments on that site are, oif course, welcome.

It has been fairly obvious in the ICT industry that employment agencies make more money placing skilled migrants in jobs than placing qualified Australians. Agencies like Hudsons and Julia Ross are keen proponents of skilled migration but these agencies are not the first port of call for Australian professionals looking for work.

IT vacancies have been measured using the Olivier Index which counts the number of job vacancies. However this index inflates the real number of vacancies because a vacancy with say Telstra, will be advertised by each of the 5 agencies that supply staff to Telstra. The Australian Computer Society counts the number of vacancies filled. The ACS thinks they are counting 25% of the market. Projections based on ACS figures indicate that 25000 positions, fulltime, part time, permanent and contract were filled in 2006. At least 4000 people graduated in ICT in 2000 alone. University qualifications are not mandatory to work in the ICT industry.

Thanks for the information on "Pig Iron Bob".

Ooops the Olivier Index counts the number of advertised vacancies, so each Telstra position would be counted 4 or 5 times. The count also included the fishing advertisements that are looking for exceptional candidates for agencies to hawk around to potential employers.

In case anyone has formed the impression that Cartman is the unchallenged authority on early 20th century Australian history when he wrote "in 1935 the Australians realised that ... they might not be able to import things like planes, from Britain etc during war," Australian politicians and public servants had, in fact, already worked that out from their experiences in the First World war and had set about building up Australia's manufacturing base in 1920 (Andrew Ross, "Amed and ready" p32).

The pinnacle of Australian aeronautical achievement in WW2 was not the Wirraway copied from an American design, but the CA15 fighter, an aircraft superior in many regards to the US P51 Mustang (442mph vs 437mph top speed) (Ross, p324) and the CA4 bomber, uniquely capable of performing roles of both dive bomber and torpedo bomber(Ross p335-342).

Both had prototypes built but were not manufactured because by that time the tide had turned against the Japanese and, in the case of the CA15, it was judged easier to manufacture Mustangs.

Earlier, in 1942 Australia had succeeded in manufacturing the Boomerang fighter, which, whilst not as capable as the Japanese Zero, would have been capable of challenging the Zero, and certainly the Oscar, over the skies of Australia with all the advantages made possible in a defensive war. The production of the Boomerang in such a very short time scale was considered a considerable technological and industrial feat.