Terry McCrann is not generally taken by dystopian visions but today he’s had one and it will be familiar to MB readers:
The end of domestic petroleum refining, car manufacturing, most other consumer goods manufacturing, food processing, bauxite refining, aluminium smelting — what’s left of the steel industry? The list just gets longer.
There are two broad ways of looking at this. There’s the positive — perhaps, insanely optimistic — way. We are closing down the industries where we simply can’t compete with low-cost Asia….It is therefore good and even great news. Out go low-skilled low-paid and ultimately dead-end jobs; in come high-skilled higher-paid sustainable jobs.
The negative way to see this, is Australia becoming China’s quarry, surrounded by very expensive real estate — much of it owned by high-achieving both non-resident Chinese and Australians of Chinese heritage — and producing very little of much else.
…Now increasingly it will only require China to get the sniffles and we would face the onset of economic pneumonia…we have doubled down on the China bet — by increasingly closing down all these other industries…Let’s be very clear, that once gone, they ain’t ever coming back.
…There are two further, rather bleak points to be made.
If we really were simply closing down inefficient operations that could never be globally competitive, that would be one thing.
But many of these closures are driven by costs, inefficiencies, red tape and regulation imposed by us in a variety of ways and methods on their operation.
…The second point goes to our financial system. We have evolved a financial system that is focused overwhelmingly on funding residential property buying and investment.
…Australia’s Field of Dreams is an ever deeper quarry, surrounded by more and more, and more expensive high rises.
Has ever a nation punted so recklessly?
