Trader wrote:Leaping Lindner wrote:This circus is far from over. Bob Katter has come out in support of raising tariffs basically dismantling any trade agreement the country have put together in the past decade or so. Gillard has refused to support this - it's unlikely even Abbott would - and also this could mean the other two independents break away from Katter.
What a **** idiot. Welcome to 40 years ago.
I can see there would be enormous difficulties reversing the lowering of our tariffs over the years, and I expect any government that tried it would be thrown out as soon as prices rose as a result.
After all, most voters don't really think past the immediate future any more than most politicians do.
Yet, I was never convinced lowering them so much and slowly killing off manufacturing capacity in Australia was a good idea, and was amazed an ALP government would do it..
I never believed, as Bob Hawke seemed to say he did, that all those process workers losing their jobs as a result could be retrained to be part of the "clever country" and finish up working in IT.
Fortunately, we have had a mining boom to provide jobs.
Now, we are in the early stages of a similar process of killing off food production in Australia to suit the supermarkets who will make bigger profits by importing cheaply and selling to the public at prices slightly lower than those we are used to now, just to make it look like it was a good idea, until they can safely jack them up again in small increments due to the lack of alternatives.
I wonder what history will say when we are importing all manufacturing goods, and dependent on imported food , and India has the "clever country" franchise sewn up.
Perhaps, then, we will mine Uranium, because mining is all that is left - if, of course, the miners haven't all gone to India too as their Uranium and Thorium resources are a match for ours.
[By then, I expect our coal will be unwanted.]
