Darrin Hodges looks at the damage being done to the Australian economy, with our manufacturing resources relocating to Asia and with a government that seems inept at best.
Early in March 2008, Treasurer Wayne Swan made an extraordinary statement in federal parliament during question time. On the back of newly-released employment figures which showed that unemployment had dropped to 4%, Wayne Swan claimed that the ALP was “the party of jobs”.
It was an extraordinarily arrogant claim, particularly given that the ALP had only just won the federal election at the end of November 2007 and parliament wouldn’t sit again until after Christmas.
On top of that, if you look at the sitting schedule for federal parliament for the months of November 2007 through to March 2008, you will see that there are only half-a-dozen actual sitting days. Yet Wayne Swan had the gall to take the credit for what looks like an anomalous dip in unemployment when the reality is, it was a legacy of the previous Howard government.
I cannot admit to being a great defender of the Howard government, but when they left office they left a sound economy and a sizable surplus – a surplus that the Rudd government wasted in the form of indirect corporate welfare, by asking recipients to go out and spend up big for Christmas.
Once again we have a federal Labor government – and once again they are driving the country into debt, once again we have unemployment, high immigration and a looming recession.
The truth is that, since the ALP assumed federal government, tens of thousands of Australians have lost their jobs, the latest being the closure by Pacific Brands of the bulk of their manufacturing operations in Australia, to – as they publicly stated – save money by relocating manufacturing to Asia where labour is literally a dime a dozen.
To add insult to injury, Pacific Brands will still be keeping Federal government grants of up to ten million dollars for ‘research and innovation’ in Australia. Since Rudd took government, the unemployment rate has risen from 4.5% in November 2007 to 4.8% in January 2009 and with that figure set to rise even higher to at least 7.5% by early 2010, I wonder if Swan still believes the ALP is the party of jobs.
What Whitlam started, Rudd has overseen the finish of – the complete annihilation of the Australian manufacturing industry, particularly textiles. The disused factories around the metropolitan areas of our major cities have become high-rise blocks of units, and our disused farmland have been turned into teeming housing estates to cater for the highest-ever immigration program undertaken by any government of this country, a program which they have stated will not be altered even in the face of the oncoming recession.
Swan may believe that the ALP is the party of jobs, but most Australians believe that the ALP is the party of liars, thieves and idiots. Rudd was telling the Australian public in October last year that “she’ll be right mate” and that China will save us from recession. What he didn’t mention is that ten thousand factories a month have been closing in China, where unemployment is measured in the hundreds of millions and their growth rate is plummeting, so much so that the Chinese government are putting measures in place to deal with any civil unrest resulting from the high unemployment.
Rudd also told us that our banks were as solid as rocks, yet he went on to institute deposit guarantees for the banks which left self-funded retirees frozen out of their own money as investment funds were not covered by the Rudd guarantee and therefore froze their own assets to prevent a run. The only solution was that these investment funds become banks and thus be covered by the guarantee, but if they wanted to be banks, they would have done so already. Additionally, ASIC has placed a ban on the short selling of bank stocks until March, which demonstrates the lies and deception, not to mention the incompetence, of the Rudd government.
The destruction of Australian manufacturing started under Whitlam when he made Australia a signatory to the Lima agreement. The basis of the Lima agreement was that Western industrialised nations would transfer their manufacturing to Third World countries, sell our raw resources to them cheap, then have to buy the finished items back at exorbitant prices. The goal of the Establishment is to turn Australia into a service based economy – this is the basis of economic engagement with Asia. Companies like Pacific Brand (who own the label ‘Bonds’) are moving their manufacturing to Asia because labour is cheaper, whilst Asian countries send their tourists to Australia – where our children will be working as wage slaves selling sushi to Asian tourists – that is what a ‘service based’ economy will look like in Australia.
A ‘service based’ economy is looming closer every day. In March, Simon Crean had just finished signing up Australia to free trade agreements with various Asian countries – giving them access to Australian markets, but restricting Australian access to their markets. That’s not free trade, that is surrender, a surrendering of our sovereignty as a nation that can feed itself. You cannot have free trade agreements with countries that pay their workers a bowl of rice a day, that have little or no union representation and have unsafe working conditions. My father always used to say that “if you trade with countries that eat rice, you’ll end up eating it yourself” and in the context of these treasonous free trade agreements, he is right on the mark.
While Rudd spends over five hundred thousand dollars swanning around the world with his wife (and in doing so, not only emulates Whitlam, but outdoes him) the unions are handing over millions of dollars to Third World countries, the socialist that is our deputy Prime Minister has refused to countenance a report that immigration should be cut back, and tens of thousands of Australians are losing their jobs.
W.G. Spence would be rolling in his grave if could see what has become of his beloved Labour movement, a movement which used to put the interests of Australian workers first.
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