“Sell ’em dirt” becomes “sell ’em services”, from Joe Hockey this morning via the ABC:
“There’s no doubt it has an impact on our budget because iron ore has been our biggest export,” Mr Hockey told ABC News Breakfast this morning.
“But we are not going to chase the fall in revenue associated with falling iron ore prices down.
“We’re not going to be imposing new taxes in order to try and recover that lost revenue.”
…”We have to pay for these initiatives so we’ll have reasonable savings that will not hurt the family budget, but at the same time we are going to spend money that should be appropriately spent to make sure the economy continues to grow.”
“We’ve got to be able to have a very clear, predictable trajectory back to surplus based on reducing expenditure and living within our means,” Mr Hockey said.
“Obviously if the iron ore price continues to fall it has impacts on production decisions, it will have an impact on the Australian dollar which then has flow on effects elsewhere,” he told the ABC’s AM program.
“What we want to do is grow the export opportunities in Asia, particularly for services exports.”
What services, exactly? There’s tourism and education and…well…more of that. Most service exports are, in fact, offshore investment with offices and people on the ground, something that Australia has proven to be dreadful at, most especially in Asia.
It’s manufacturing that is the untapped export market for Australia. Yet it’s still being destroyed at a tremendous rate thanks to Mr Hockey’s killing of the car industry, his failure to address the currency:
And his failure to address the east coast gas shock.
What a shame we can’t export useless slogans, we’d have a current account surplus overnight.
