Sunday, July 26, 2009

Janet Albrechtsen, Lindsay Tanner, the unions, and FUD made and sold for less than two dollars in a foreign owned Murdoch broadsheet


We cannot forget the unions were responsible for getting the ALP elected ...

So much for the Australian people. You'd have to think they deserved a little of the credit or the blame.

Perhaps the unions have some kind of mind parasite they inject into the collective unconscious, or is it a simple matter of mass hypnosis?

Surely the people elect the government? Isn't that what representative democracy is all about?

No, it's just Janet Albrechtsen getting upset with them yet again, in Buy Australia sells us short.

Suck it up Janet. It wasn't the unions, it was 52.7% of Australians that done it. But by golly it's a popular angle. I can't believe the number of comments you've scored for it:

Janet's getting excited - yet again - and so are all those commentators, this time about the unions bunging on a campaign to get governments to give a price advantage to local suppliers when tendering for government contracts.

There's an irony here of course - the proposal has been around for years, and was regularly floated during the heyday of the Pauline Hanson One Nation party. You know, the mob John Howard said should be allowed to go around waving the flag, and giving him nice election issues.

But it's  hard to know what Ablrechtsen's beef is at the moment - you expect interest groups to lobby, and you expect governments to govern, and thus far the latest I saw on it - well actually it was today - it was Lindsay Tanner yet again giving a firm thumbs down to the idea.

'Price discrimination against imports would threaten our international trade obligations, it would cost the government more,' he told Network Ten on Sunday.

'And, in practise, the vast bulk of the things we import are things that actually aren't manufactured in Australia like photocopiers and fighter jets.'

Mr Tanner said this was like helping his 15-year-old daughter with her homework - a waste of his time which did nothing for her education.

He said the government did need to help build capacity in Australia and there was much that co
uld be done to make it easier for Australian companies to compete.

'But if we actually tilt the playing field artificially in their favour, that does them no benefits in the longer term and a return to protectionism would be a disaster for the Australian economy in the wider sense,' he said.

'That is something we are absolutely committed to avoiding.' (
here)

Well that seems to take care of Albechtsen's FUD for the moment, though if you can be bothered, she goes on at length in a lathering and foaming way worthy of Piers Akerman repeating Tanner's talking points (talk about deadline ironies). 

To be fair, she can pick a bone with the NSW government, which is so dumb that it will shortly expire from inertia, and take along with it a policy that allows local firms to bid up to 25% higher than international rivals for government contracts and still win the tender.

But behind this little flurry of FUD, and the anxiety of unions handing over money to Labor (as if business never handed over cash to the Liberals) lies the scarring from the effectiveness of the unions' campaign on John Howard's Work Choices. Old news. Suck it up Janet, no point brooding.

But if you can't have a hundred per cent disaster on this matter, why not hope for a fifty per cent disaster? Such as the unions' fall back campaign for a national action plan for manufacturing.

Starting with a completely outrageous ambit claim we can feel relieved and relaxed when we are offered a compromise, which is less of a disaster than the original request is an old union negotiating trick. And it often works. But Australians need to be alert to this. We should not thank the Rudd Government just because it ends up with only 50 per cent of a catastrophe instead of the 100 per cent disaster the unions wanted.

No, we can leave the talk of catastrophe and workers out of work to the Murdoch tabloids, as they crank up the tears whenever a Pacific Brands heads overseas to manufacture underwear and singlets.


Ah the good old days when the issues were clear to a Murdoch hack. The government was costing jobs so we'd end up working for Chinese wages.

The commentariat will have fun playing with the union mice when the ALP national conference gets underway in Sydney this week, but let's see what the unions manage to score before we get as excited - perhaps it'll only be a match for the government underpinning of the likes of Macquarie as they stared down the barrel of their cupidity not so long ago.

Which reminds me of how the commentariat columnists were busy for months telling us how the sky was going to fall in - by the next week at the latest - and the recession likely to turn into a profound depression as a result of government fiddling with the levers. I guess when all you've got is union bashing, it must be like having a pacifier - sucking on the teat of same old, same old.

As for me, I'm a devotee of two dollar stores. What an effective way to inhibit shopping, since anything you buy is likely to fall apart just after the warranty expires. That's if there is a warranty. 

The manufacturing skill involved in building a heater that will exactly last twelve months and one day is mind boggling, so long may we continue to ship over our raw materials to China so they can ship back our two dollar merchandise, which will fail at an appropriate time, and then become handy landfill, and then the cycle can repeat all over again. 

When I was doing reports on this kind of economic activity, we liked to dub it a virtuous circle. As opposed to the feedback from Dame Slap which often feels a little like a vicious circle.

That said, I'm a bit worried for her. This latest outing has the length and direction of a Mitchell Johnson over (ever since I started reading Tim Blair I've learnt ever so much about cricket and what losers and whiners the Australian team is, with their blaming the umpires), and here's hoping she can direct her bouncers closer to St. Kev's helmet.

(Below: a typical bargain store, testament to the virtues of international trade, so that we humble lumpenproletariats can buy bed cocks for a measly two dollars).


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