Thankyou Jumbuck and Robert for your pertinent comments. Pretty well on the money from where I sit.
Perhaps a gst. of 20-30% at point of sale on all imported retail products could help redress the imbalance between the cost of our labour and that of the slaves in free trade zones. Every dollar spent on these imports adds to the country's foreign deficit and has to be balanced with foreign earnings.
Surely there are some classes of goods which could again be produced in this country especially if they were gst. free.
Such a move would bring a number of wins. The government would gain more revenue from the increased gst. on imported goods and the income tax from those re-employed. The social security bill would be reduced or the money reallocated and the dependency on foreign exchange would lessen.
I believe that retail price increases would not necessarily follow because at the moment prices are not based on production and distribution costs but on what the market will stand in terms of spending power. For instance I recently purchased a camera which had a local retail price of $559, I took the camera with me on a trip to Kathmandu in Nepal where I saw the same camera for sale for $235 brand new. Who is being ripped off here? us.
Den71

I have for years advocated that Australia should saw off the rest of the world.
We should import nothing that we can manufacture here.
That would mean we would still import large aircraft, some electronics
parts such as CPU chips, and no doubt a number of things that have not come to mind.

It will take many years to build up the technical knowhow to acheive,
this but it must be done, because otherwise we will just be a quarry
and source of cheap food for the owners of the country.

You can now see it happening, even the gas we need is being sold off
not by us but by overseas companies.
The Chinese are buying, not just oil fields but our productive land.

WELCOME TO THE COOLIE SOCIETY !

Manufacturing moving off-shore is mainly the result of corporate greed chasing higher profits plus consumer demand for ever-decreasing prices for their goods and has been going on for a very long time.

Both sides of politics have failed to halt this migration and neither side is likely to even try.

There was an attempt to raise our education levels about 10 years ago with a view to becoming a more innovative society but the government decided we couldn't compete with the "bowl of rice a day" wages and thought we should concentrate on providing services instead.

In other words, serving coffee and sandwiches to visiting tourists and using the money they pay us to import the goods they manufacture.

Welcome to the world economy.

* but it would increase our nation’s wealth and with wealth comes comfort*

Well no, Sonofgloin. Things like Ipads and computers would become so expensive, that you simply could not afford them. So your standard of living would drop dramatically.

In the longer term everything will become local as the well head cost of
oil reaches levels that cannot be afforded except for pharmacauticals and some plastics etc.

International trade will decline except for very compact devices.
It actually has started already, it is just that you have not noticed.

There will be plenty of oil available, it is just that it will be so
expensive that production will be only be a very small percentage of current production.
It will be a crime to burn oil.

Welcome to the post peak oil world.

"Well no, Sonofgloin. Things like Ipads and computers would become so expensive, that you simply could not afford them. So your standard of living would drop dramatically."

And they raise our standard of living?