Worked this time RObert, and it spoke to me
At my birth the Navy, that is pick and shovel men, worked hard but had a job
One backhoe can do the work of a few dozen now
So can we up production, cut costs/jobs and still sell our products forever?
Do we want to

individual,
>The constant raising of the Dollar will eventually morph it into a Rupiah !
What a weird claim! The dollar is not being constantly raised, and nobody is proposing doing so.

We're genuinely much more productive than the Indonesians at the moment. That may change in future, but if so, it will be them catching up to us rather than us being dragged down to their level.

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runner,
>The thing that the socialist have always feared is that people will be rewarded on efforts and results
It's generally the opposite: socialists want the people who do the work to be rewarded more, and those who supply the capital to be rewarded less.

Aidan,
Just because you're not yet affected doesn't make things better for those who are.
When labour costs go up the currency de-values ! Deceitful financial graphs are not showing the unproductive factor from wage rises.
Or, are you saying the Aus$ is not responsible for all the shut-downs of Australian industries ?
Or, are you one of those people who think because things don't happen within a 24 hour period they don't happen ?

Indy, seems your National Welfare Fund got gobbled up over 30 years ago, and the dosh went to consolidated revenue. Then Howard spent it on a boost to war mongering.

My research has shown that the average old folk can live on $20 per day. My call for bring the pension down to about $300/week was excessive, a figure of $300/fortnight would be sufficient. In the form of a debit card of course, so to curtail the extravagant spending on luxuries many pensioners indulge in, drinking down at the RSL for one, getting into expensive shouts with a dozen others, disgraceful.

Did you know, they discovered an old aged pensioner in Sydney in her 80's who had amassed a fortune of over $240,000 from her aged pension payments! disgraceful.

individual,
>Just because you're not yet affected doesn't make things better for those who are.
Huh? WTF are you trying to claim, and what assumptions are you making about me?

>When labour costs go up the currency de-values !
All other things bing equal, that would be correct. But reality is far more complicated, and labour costs are just one factor of many.

>Deceitful financial graphs are not showing the unproductive factor from wage rises.
What graphs are you referring to. Do you think graphs showing the wage share of GDP are deceitful?

>Or, are you saying the Aus$ is not responsible for all the shut-downs of Australian industries ?
Not all of them. Even if its value halved it wouldn't've been enough to save much of the TCF industry. We should accept that for low value work it's often better to rely on imports. We should also accept that what was once high value work sometimes becomes low value work due to technological change and overseas industrialization.

However, when the Aus$ is overvalued (as in the Gillard-Abbott era when needlessly high interest rates pushed up its short term value at the expense of its long term value) it is extremely damaging to Australian industries.

>Or, are you one of those people who think because things don't happen within a 24 hour period they don't happen ?
No, but nor am I one of those people who assumes there to be a long term trend which there's no evidence of.

Wanna know how to increase wages?

"U.S. employers posted nearly 7.6 million open jobs in January, near a record high set in November. ...
The number of open jobs now outnumbers the unemployed by roughly 1 million. In the 18 years that the data has been tracked, there were always more unemployed than job openings until last year."

"US wage growth hits nine-year high".... http://www.bbc.com/news/business-45448323

Nah...let's get the government to just mandate the rises instead. That's much more sustainable </sarc>