This would give work for Australians in steel supply, design, detailing, fabrication, painting and erection. Car manufacturers might leave. these people would not - they live here.
My
plan is a baby step to apply a selective tariff
on fabricated structural steel from India and/or Indonesia. The reason
for starting with those two countries is based on my own experience. I was
working at the steelworks at Port Kembla when the Columbo Plan was producing
such great results. We were teaching Indian engineers how to produce steel more
efficiently.
Many
decades later I was part of a small team sent to Indonesia. We taught young
Indonesian engineers how to be better at controlling the extensions of the Krakatau
Steel Plant.
India
and Indonesia accepted that they could become more productive and we were
pleased to assist.
Our
questions are:
2.
Accept
that our manufacturing has put us into 25th place out of 26 countries in a recent survey
3.
Realise
that no economist has countered that presented by a professor from Monash
University in Churchill Victoria that:
It has been good for Australia to eliminate traditional
manufacturing to make way for cost based innovative industry.
The only two examples
he gave were niche aircraft manufacturing and cutting edge animation
design. The aircraft company he referred
to went into free fall two weeks later. The half dozen or so jobs produced by
animation design will find it difficult to match the more than a million jobs
lost.
4. Be prepared
to even think about presenting the case for a selective tariff – even for a
trial period?
Two weeks after the niche aircraft initiative was suggested the local newspaper heading was "Aero Jobs in Free Fall." The detail tells that the company would have collapsed before an Indian company bought the majority of the shares. The new overseas owners now feel that the next version of the aircraft should be manufactured offshore.
About a million jobs were lost while traditional manufacturing is being phased out and perhaps innovative animation design might support 4 or 5 people. No wonder we are cynical
Manufacturing
Warren Truss talked of Australia's future in manufacturing in "cutting edge products." This sounds wonderful but Australia has bad history in making discoveries but having to go overseas for them to be made commercial. Some examples are cat's eyes on roads, black box recorders and various solar panel initiatives.
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