Aime,there is another very important reason to keep manufacturing here.When Aussies invent new products/concepts there is no concrete or intellectual infrastructure to develop the product here.Industries and our Universities used to work in unision.We now just educate foreigners so we can be their future serfs.

We have really lost the plot,because most of our innovations just go overseas.The concept of a totally Globalised Planet whereby everything has a price and is up for grabs repulses me.Why bother having borders or an Aussie flag?

Tristan You overlook (like everybody else) the real reason for the real estate price increases. This is a flood of credit as banks take on what economists call "good private debt" to cover the enormous Current Account Deficit (CAD) now standing at more than a billion dollars a week. They need us to take on the interest burden by bidding up the prices with mortgage loans. They'll give you enough to bid the price up even if you can't prove that you have an income ("no doc here" and "sub prime" in the USA).

The problem now is that we don't have much more free cash to pay much more interest. But our demand for imports and the continual closing of factories because of free "trade" means that the banks are going to be stuck with more and more of this marvelous "private" debt to cover the CAD which is running at 16 billion dollars a quarter. They are putting up fees in a desperate attempt to cover it. But the interest rates must go up.

The tipping point is close real estate prices in the USA are dropping.

If the governments (liberal and labor) had been considering the battlers they would not now need to be (privately) concerned about the big end of town. Poverty looks like filtering up as it did in the 1930s.

"Ah mammons slaves your Knees will knock.
Your hearts in terror beat
When god demand an answer for the faces in the street"

from "Faces in the Street" by Henry Lawson

Tristan’s version is contributed by the New Labour Left Proletariat abyss of Creative acounting -; you see, in many ways demand is the determining factor in some instances, and more so when a new product is released on the market to recoup costs of Research and Development; and now you must realise that only exists in a certain category of consumer goods.
But to rephrase a terminology, it is not actually the economic cost of production on sale, instead it has become an Auction in its literal interpretation and on sold to the highest bidder , and with housing and Property, the rediculess over inflated costs imposed by government Looting is included.Note; Labour Party prolateriat economics at work here.

That is working off a Leviathanic assumption that you have money to purchase it , or you are able to service the loan to finance it; Yet again Value for Value has been distorted and costs dramatically inflated.

Bright spark is correct in his/her assumption that we are witnessing again the catalyst that set off the 1930’s depression- and again we are left to ask the same questions- Where the hell did the money go;;; and a short answer is exactly the same place our farmers have been forced to go, into an abyss.

Be certain , Enron was just a drop in the ocean, Value for value no longer exists in mainstream business ; just a who lot of empire building and looting and Governments Leviathanic existence is the over weight cretin to tip the scales… and is doing so.