The high Australian dollar gets a lot of the blame, but only mining gets blamed for that. Nobody mentions foreigners buying up properties, and foreign students paying for their education, they also raise the dollar.
But regardless of the dollar, some manufacturing should be protected to keep manufacturing skills in the country. Skills useful for national security, and to spin off into new manufacturing sectors. It's madness just to let it die. Some industries need to be protected. It's that simple.
And what does prime minister Tony Abbott have to say? Simply that it's his job to ensure there's more jobs in the economy being created than being lost. Australia is a balance sheet, not a society, to Tony Abbott. The end justifies the means. But he never mentions where these mythical new jobs are coming from. That's because they don't exist.
Tony Abbott, like Kevin Rudd, is another ideological wrecking ball. Only this time we've swung from the transnational open-borders Kevin Rudd to the anarchistic free-trader Tony Abbott.
Free trade is an ideology for lazy thinkers. Idiots who are comforted by blind lazy adherence to a mindless ideology.
Sure, we can save a few thousand dollars on the price of a car, or a few dollars on a can of food. But what happens when we can't compete in anything other than some mining and farming?
File under: R.I.P. Free Trade.
(h/t: @AustProtParty)
There are plenty of jobs out there, but they're low-skilled jobs like aged care in nursing homes. Otherwise, there's only mining. The real fallout from losing manufacturing industries is the loss of engineering skills, the disincentive to pursue a career in engineering, and the loss of satisfying work. The free market doesn't care about any of that, and that's why some hands-on market intervention is necessary. But free-trade purists like Abbott and Hockey will take their fundamentalism to the grave, they won't change. We need another party like the Protectionist Party.
ReplyDeleteYeah after Toyota announced their closure, Abbott said that Coles were offering new jobs. Whoopee, jobs in Coles. That pretty much says everything about Abbott. He's a bottom-line balance-sheet fundamentalist, he doesn't care about the type of jobs.
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