Tapp, good idea about using Australian only goods. What happens when every other country decides that they won't buy Australian?

No markets for our exports, thats what. We would be a lot worse off if we didn't trade with the rest of the world, i absolutely guarantee you. Aust would become a banana republic for real.

No Mate

There off course would be certain things that would be needed to be imported, but lets tax them as much as they tax us.

Also standards, if they do not meet the standards of what is put on our own producers it doesnt come in.

Markets well we have to eat so the markets will still work but instead of us sending wheat overseas and getting flour back and paying more and inferior product do it ourselves.

So things can work out and this will also assist in the country's security as if we have to rely on other country's to eat we are really in trouble.

I beleive in looking after our own backyard first.

Stuart Ulrich
Independent Candidate for Charlton

Can Australia ever be self-reliant for national defence?

Answer: Yes, Australia could have become self-reliant for its own national defence. And no, it has little to do with immigration-driven population growth, and much more to do with technological superiority. Look at Israel for example.

On the issue of whether we should use immigration-driven population growth to boost our national defence capabilities, Australia would be wise to tread very carefully. Do we really want a fifth column in our midst?

To quote the National Observer:

"On the one hand, it is clearly desirable for Australia's security that our population be much increased. But on the other hand, the acceptance of large numbers of ethnic Chinese, for example, may present security difficulties in future decades. China, despite its claimed heritage of civilisation, has proved to be most uncivilised in fact. The Chinese have behaved barbarously in terms of liquidating many millions for real or spurious political reasons and in systematic forced abortions. It is not clear how far Chinese territorial ambitions extend or to what extent the Chinese will come to regard themselves as entitled to prescribe policies for South-East Asian countries. Further, the presence of a large Chinese minority in Australia might be perceived by Communist China or a successor as a reason for interfering in Australian affairs. These are serious matters, and should not be disregarded at the behest of political correctness."

http://www.nationalobserver.net/1999_spring_br5.htm

To anyone still paying attention, I will attempt to wrap up what I wrote earlier.

I have to confess that about two months ago, when I read the claim in "National Insecurity"(2007) that Australia way militarily prepared to defend itself against a Japanese invasion in 1942, I was highly skeptical. I accepted the same conventional wisdom that others on this thread have attempted to argue, that is, that the U.S. had saved Australia.

However, the evidence to the contrary in Ross's "Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945"(1995) upon which the claim is based, seems conclusive and has not since been refuted by any comparably well researched work since then. Also, I have failed to find on the Internet any attempt to refute the details of his thesis.

Australia had between the First and Second World Wars changed from being a nation dependent upon imported technology to one which was self-reliant. The fact that in many regards Australian forces on the ground were not well prepared at the start of the conflict in the Pacific, as others have pointed out, is beside the point. As Ross wrote in the introduction:

"A huge industrial juggernaut was created, and by the time the Japanese were able to begin preparations to invade in early 1942, so much equipment and supplies had been manufactured that an enormous Australian military force was capable of being placed in the field in Australia. This is contrary to all perceptions of Australia's level of preparation at this time. But the Japanese knew. They had been studying Australia's industrial development from the early 1930's until late 1941. They had deduced that the munitions capability of Australian secondary industry and concluded that they could not supply and transport the size of invasion force deemed necessary to give a reasonable assurance of military success. General Macarthur did not save Australia. It was saved by the deliberate development of secondary industry by the captains of industry and Australian governments. ... " (tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove) "... They raised the threshold of the necessary Japanese invasion force beyond any possibility the Japanese had of supplying it." (p xv)

This revelation raises a number of important questions:

1. Why has Australia's proud history of technological and industrial achievement been allowed to have been forgotten?,

2. Why has Ross's groundbreaking work been largely ignored?, and

3. Why is it that this Government, supposedly the one which best has Australia's defence at heart, chosen to turn its back on our proud history and, instead, has discriminated against both Australian and European defence equipment suppliers in order to make Australia dependent upon inferior and more expensive equipment supplied by the U.S.? (See discussion on "National Insecurity" at http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/07/08/what-ive-been-reading-18/ and my own review of the book at http://candobetter.org/node/96#defence (admittedly based on that time on an incomplete reading).)

I can only conclude that it actually suited the predominant section of Australia's current ruling elite, who John Howard now serves, to have allowed Australia to have been turned from an advanced industrial nation that it was in 1945 into what it is today - an economic basket case which achieves the false illusion of prosperity by digging up and exporting to the world its climate-changing non-renewable mineral resources and by flogging its real estate on the world market.

The former requires effort, whilst the latter delivers easy money to those who are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of fellow Australians and future generations.

---

As I have already mentioned on previous occasions this group has been referred to as "The Growth Lobby". It has been described in Sheila Newman's Masters thesis of 2002 "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France". It is a 2.6Mb pdf file, the core of which is 238 pages long and can be downloaded from http://candobetter.org/sheila