Bob Katter has gotten into the wishlist business.
I haven’t yet found the complete document, but if the aspects of it reported in the media are representative, it’s going to be pretty hard for either side of politics to give him much.
Amongst other things, Katter apparently thinks the Australian dollar is too high:
“The dollar is about twice as high as it should be and all of the rural industries of Australia are dying,” he said.
“If you bring your interest rates down in line with all the other countries then the dollar will come down and that will be of enormous benefit.”
Great. Try explaining to the voters of, say, Lindsay, that they’re paying an extra sixty cents a litre for fuel just to help out the canegrowers of Innisfail.
Update: Thanks to Terry in comments, here’s Katter’s full wishlist.
As the German mathematician Armand Borel said in 1959 when watching experimental prototypes of space rockets that were to be powered by nuclear explosions,
“Zis is not nuts, it’s super nuts”.
The only way this wishlist would get off the ground is if we were all transported back to the 1920′s and the Country Party was one seat short of a majority.
Outside of that fantastical senario this is just mad.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight that the independents desist with their wishlists and resolve this matter before they lose their grey matter.
Robert – swings and roundabouts though – residents of Lindsay will be also paying less in montly mortgage payments. And the high dollar doesn’t only affect canegrowers but all export related industries – a knowledge based economy can be just as badly affected.
Don’t know how they can just lower interest rates though – short of withdrawing more stimulus funds to force the reserve bank to stimulate the economy through interest rates.
Bringing interest rates down to levels in other countries, which means effectively zero, will hyper charge the economy and double digit inflation will be with us before you can say “insane hayseed”.
Which will then lead to double digit interest rates to reign it all in.
The 3 Wise Men Independents are coming around to the right way of thinking at last …..more special spending for rural australia!
I wouldn’t bother to try and advance a complicated and far fetched explanation about national good being the true result, just demand heaps of spending in rural areas and screw the urban voter – they do when the normal order of things is in place.
They should show no mercy for the voters of Lindsay or any other marginal electorate.
The voters of these areas have made economic choices and they are now living with the consequences.Swings and roundabouts.
Katter is mad to even think that the Reserve Bank and Treasury would happily run a regime controlling interest rates and exchange values.It is a bizarre request and reflects poorly on his understanding of how the economy works.
Just focus on maximising the spending on regional infrastructure, health and education and get more of the tax take from the mining industries returned to rural areas.
Katter must be more conservative than I thought. He has romanticised the past unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen. Nobody can objectively call the government’s politicised control on finance from pre 1980s (as he’s advocating) as having been a good thing.
come off it people, the dollar is too high! yes we know why it got there, due to the mining boom, and we know we can’t do much of anything about it, because a floating dollar is a good thing, but mocking him for saying that it’s too high is a bit foolishly partisan. A lower dollar would make exports cheaper and imports dearer, it would improve our terms of trade and be in our net benefit.
The dollar is also too high because of too much stimulus
Sam nails it.
wilful @ 8,
But books bought from overseas are cheaper.
Paul @ 11 – book prices are artificially high here because labor wimped out on removing parallel import restrictions
The dollar is high because world commodity prices are high and we export commodities. Lowering interest rates won’t make the dollar any lower.
And, as Paul said, a high dollar is very nice for those of us who buy things from overseas.
You people still buy dead tree books? How quaint.
S’pose we might expect money for the building of a larger banana than Coffs Harbour or better still, a gigantic pork chop.
You people still buy dead tree books? How quaint.
The high dollar means cheap kindle downloads.
So there.
I don’t know much about Katter, but from reading his list I don’t think he’s nuts at all. Looking behind the specific proposals at what he wants to achieve, I can’t find much to disagree with. (I love the idea of breaking up Coles & Woolworths)
Some of his methods might not work, and there might be better ways to achieve those ends, but that’s for Julia to demonstrate. A good start to negotiation would be to agree that you want the same outcomes, and show how your methods of achieving them will work.
Wilful, seriously, I take your point.
But…we’re actually net exporters of goods and services at the moment, for the first time in a while, and there’s every reason to expect our exports to continue to increase.
So helping exporters generally would seem to be a lesser priority at the moment, particularly with the kind of help that hurts everyone who isn’t an exporter.
If we want to help non-mining exporters, there’s got to be better ways to do that – like taxing miners and using some of the proceeds to reduce taxes on other exporters.
Katter’s wishlist is now on the ABC website. One of his demands is no carbon tax and no emissions trading scheme.
So we are going to drop the interest rate by 4 full percentage points?
(http://www.fxstreet.com/fundamental/interest-rates-table/)
And you say the stimulus increased the Aussie dollar, imagine an economy on crack cocaine.
Good way to create a housing bubble. So what caused the GFC again?
This is a bit OT, but the price of books is mentioned in the discussion.
Chris @ 12: ‘book prices are artificially high here because labor wimped out on removing parallel import restrictions’.
Removing parallel importation rules would have been just as difficult and contentious for a Liberal government, and was not implemented during the Howard years. It would produce an erosion of local intellectual content and industries that provide it (publishing and printing), as well as a significant loss of income for local authors; it is already difficult to publish local books in a small market. Most experts on all sides of politics agree that the provision of local intellectual content is an asset for any country. Parallel importation rules (30 days delay) give a short market advantage to locally published books. This rule already operates in the US and Europe.
Most people working in local arts and publishing industries are strongly opposed to the removal of parallel importation rules.
I’m not sure if comparisons of intellectual capital with international market economics is a suitable parallel. Perhaps it is, in economic rationalist terms. I tend to think that arts industries, which can’t easily generate the sort of capital discussed here, deserve basic market protection for their survival.
It would help not just canegrowers but every Australian farmer and business suffering unfair competition from cheap imports.
Ethanol fuels would be cheaper than fossil fuel which is all to the good, you would not even need to mandate a mix.
Better outline of Bob Katter’s wishlist here:
http://www.cairns.com.au/article/2010/09/03/125301_local-news.html
Never mind Tony’s costings, let’s see predicted outcomes from Katters points…
Writing Bob Katter off as a dill is IMHO rather unwise. Sure he is seemingly brash etc but he says out loud what a lot of rural, regional and indeed city people think. He just doesnt waste time fronting up/expressing himself in a way ‘acceptable’ to everyone’s sensibilites especially the MSM.
He has his less colourful moments and they are worth seeking out. Door stops dont always let you know what Bob really thinks. Indeed they dont do most people justice at all – they are merely ambushes for deadlines and the media bosses.
Bob (and Tony and Rob) has delivered for his constituents for a long time.He reflects their many different, complex views. He probably knows that many are not doable.
But, in giving those views a national voice he delivers recogntition to his constitutents and pays them long overdue respect. Now he can also turn around an let them know what is really possible. They know he wont bulls**t. Hopefully each of the Indies will carefully explain their reasons.
Not taking the time to hear what each constituent/member has to say – to show them respect – is what has costed the Coalition and the ALP votes. It is a lesson that the ALP in particular needs to address big time – each member, one unique voice, one unique vote.
I’m not saying he’s stupid. I’m saying he’s wrong – or, at least, the policies he’s advocating are more wrong than right.
They might – might – help some of his constituents, at the expense of screwing over the rest of us.
As for ethanol fuel, the only reason it’s cheap is because the excise concessions (and the fact that some people don’t understand that its calorific value is lower and, thus, your fuel economy is worse if you use it).
It’s an interesting list — it would be nice if someone with more time on their hands than I could tease out what Katter sees as the problems to which he has listed these solutions. I can see that not all the solutions are practicable, but that doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real.
The dollar could be brought done by investing offshore using the proceeds of a mining tax. This is how to avoid “Dutch Disease”.
I don’t think all the list is particularly stupid. Some of it I certainly don’t agree with (e.g non-independent interest rates, no carbon tax). But other parts of it are very interesting, e.g.
I certainly do not see anything bad with that – the first part is just good basic Labour Movement policy (and an anathema to the Liberal Party), and the second part seems to be an acceptable compromise at first look (how you’d exclude multinational agri-business from such ‘collective’ bargaining positions might be an interesting question).
I think Katter’s an interesting fellow who actually might have some positive policy ideas. I don’t agree with everything he says but I certainly don’t take him for a fool either.
Katter gets on very well with Kevin Rudd. I think he also has good relations with Wayne Swan. Nambour in the 60s would have been a lot like Katter country.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/03/3001586.htm
Oh yeah. No 10 on the list is a doozy:
He needs to keep in mind that such rights to collective bargaining as are enjoyed by unionists, those rights that he wants extended to individual farmers engaging in the quaint act of combination, would not be enjoyed by unionists under Workchoices.
Does this mean he’ll support the ALP?
Chookie @ 25
I think part of the problem is that a lot of agriculture is being wiped out from a combination of cheap imports and expensive exports. It seems crazy to me as a city-dweller that we import produce from countries when we can provide it from agriculture available locally. Especially when that import is subsidised by the country of origin, and even worse, when we totally compromise our biosecurity to satisfy the high priests of the WTO. Basically, fuck Phillipine bananas.
I say this as someone who was perfectly happy to support South African workers when I bought a new Ford Focus late last year, its not like they make decent small cars locally. But foodstuffs it seems to me, seems to be in a different category, I always try to buy local, free range meats and our vegetables are local and organic, and the stuff is way better than the toxic shit they sell at Coles.
Farmers are not labour.
They’re capital.
Katter obviously is an agrarian socialist with little grasp of economics. However, I understand his and others anger at our low/no tarrif policies. I fully support the move to lower/no tarrifs but we should have tit-for-tat tarrif policies – imports from countries that have tarrifs and protectionist policies should have tarrifs placed on them to attempt to level the playing field.
I have no idea what that would mean from the perspective of the WTO or existing Free Trade agreements but think it is the right way to go – an Aussie fair go policy on trade.
As for his comments on interest rates and the exchange rate – the floating dollar is a triumph of economic policy.
In any case, how in the hell would this “collective bargaining” process work?
Are we going to have taxpayer-guaranteed floor prices for commodities? That worked so bloody brilliantly for wool, didn’t it?
Under this scheme it is plausible that farmers would have to go before a “fair price commission” seeking a per unit or per measure increase in the price of their commodity. The price to be set by a committee. Wait a minute, what happened to the market? It is very clear that he was influemced by Black Jack but are the Libs rwady for this? If a Lib government depended on keeping Katter happy I’d love to read the MSM journos justifying the reintroduction of non-market based commodity prices.
Robert: the “collective bargaining for small rural businesses” works just like any other cartel – the businesses develop a monopoly (or monopsony) position and use that to dictate market prices.
I’m a little torn, because that’s not very nice but on the other hand neither is a selling into a monopsony market. I also wonder what happened to the farmer co-ops that I’m used to from NZ horticulture, where a bunch of growers would combine to build a processing plant of some sort, then sell from that. So you’d get the local apple packing co-op, dairy co-op and so on. Which these days have become Fonterra and “Apple and Pear”, but the point remains. I assume there are legislative restrictions that prevent such things arising in Australia (I vaguely recall Fonterra being denied when I tried to buy the Victorian dairy producers a few years ago)
Moz, co-ops have a long history in Australian agriculture as well. Murray Goulburn (the big milk and cheese producer) is still a co-op. AWB Limited was a coop. SPC was a co-op. Most of them have been floated on the stock market.
Part of the problem is the tension between maximising the prices paid to farmers, and running an efficient processing business.
akn, and the problem is that many agricultural producers sell into a global market. Yes, we could (theoretically) recreate single desk arrangements, but we’ll still be largely price takers.
To treat the issue seriously: the unit price paid to food producers is a disgrace. katter’s argument for busting up the duopoly would be more effective than bringing back single desk arrangements. However, if Katter wants to introuduce this sort of project it appears to me to be a reasonable moment to initiate an all out attack on neo-liberalism’s ideal of unregulated markets.
Robert,
I would have said that a farm is a business like any other – but I agree. Businesses should not be subsidised and if they go broke, they go broke.
They are entitled to decent infrastructure (like any other business) from general taxation, but that’s about all.
Following on from discussion on other threads, though, I do not think that gigabit broadband meets that description.
.
akn,
If the unit price is too low they can always just get out of the business.
The Bruce Highway in Katter’s electorate needs upgrading and this requires “Small but significant funding”. I hope he’s undertaken some important but irrelevant analysis of this.
Chookie you’re right – he’s prescribed some solutions without really properly analysing the problems although this is understandable given that many of the solutions involve restoring the world to the way it used to be.
If Woolworths and Coles drive a hard bargain with farmers and this brings down the price of food, so much the better for the consumers of food.
Sam, consumers can (and do) already choose that option, every time they buy cheap imported food. The question is to what extent the government should encourage that choice, or not. There’s trade barriers and non-tarrif trade barriers (like the “can’t import apples from NZ because their fire blight is different from the Australian apple blight even though they’re genetically indistinguishable” one)
“I would have said that a farm is a business like any other …. If the unit price is too low they can always just get out of the business”
So a farm is like a brothel is like a medical practice is like a casino ….?? I don’t think so. Instead of operating only on some theoretical level, it’s a good idea to look at all the influences organisations have in the communities in which they operate.
“If Woolworths and Coles drive a hard bargain with farmers and this brings down the price of food, so much the better for the consumers of food”
This is another mistake – to look at just one measure, the price. The way those food businesses operate has many effects – we are many things besides ‘food consumers’
Tatyana @ 21 – at best its a stop gap measure for the local industry. As has been pointed out people just end up buying books from overseas either in paper or even cheaper in electronic form which results in the government losing GST revenue meaning there is less money available for direct grants to writers. The higher dollar hurts the local book industry as well.
Sam @ 42 – yes as its pretty much inevitable that dealing with the independents is going to result in a more protectionist and more regulated regime, we’re going to also end up with higher food prices.
@40, “If the unit price is too low they can always just get out of the business.”
So you have a farm that’s been in the family for a generation or two, you’ve invested a lot of time and money there, sheds, equipment, fencing, irrigation, fertility etc. You live there, made a home, garden, planted trees and raised your kids there. You have close friends and are part of a community with schools, hospital, garage, shops, banks etc.
Of course “they can always just get out of the business” as you dumbly suggested but if the unit price is too low then no one is going to buy your business so you will have to walk out of your home, off the farm, out of the community, with nothing, leaving behind a valuable asset which could be producing valuable crops if some fuckwits didn’t decide to dismantle tariffs, forcing you to compete with other countries on all sorts of unfair terms.
@42, you can still drive a hard bargain and pay a fair price. Woolworths and Coles are quite happy to NOT pay a fair price, completely unworried that they are driving their suppliers to the edge of insolvency and out of business.
I also agree with Razor and Bob Katter in that we’ve been played for fools regarding tariffs/subsidies and so-called free trade for far too long. I agree that free trade benefits everyone, but it’s classic prisoner’s dilemma and we’ve been getting the rough end of the pineapple for far too long. Abolish 100% of import tariffs, but have a scrupulous, independent board place punitive tariffs on countries that maintain their tariff walls and secret tariffs.
Actually that would be quite impossible to do, since most goods aren’t like for like – would we penalise Boeing for example, for US subsidies to beef production, in competition for Japan?
Chris @ 46: ‘Tatyana @ 21 – at best its a stop gap measure for the local industry. As has been pointed out people just end up buying books from overseas either in paper or even cheaper in electronic form which results in the government losing GST revenue meaning there is less money available for direct grants to writers. The higher dollar hurts the local book industry as well.’
This is a far more nuanced debate. The point is not only how the variations in the exchange rate of the Australian dollar and loss of GST revenue affect the price of books, but mostly it is a concern about the ability of local authors to gain publishing contracts and earn royalties in what would become a ‘distribution market’, as it is referred to in publishing. Very few authors manage to get grants (and I’m not sure what minuscule fraction of GST revenue is used to fund bodies such as the Literature Board or Australia Research Council). Publishing is not about relying on government grants, but about being able to sell your product, earn royalties for your authors, and provide a continuous stream of local intellectual capital. Ultimately, many forms of publishing are about the development and support of local culture.
The issue of cheaper electronic publications you mention is well recognised in various branches of publishing, but a cheaper publication does not automatically result in reduced royalties for the author or loss of revene for the publisher.
Naturally, people will buy books overseas, and with the strong dollar we currently enjoy, those books will be cheaper. People are free to shop where they will get a better deal, but if they want to buy a local author, they’ll still have to buy the publication here, in most instances.
There are quite a number of industry experts who suggest that the removal of parallel importation rights would not result in cheaper books in this market in the long run. Also, many have predicted that Australia would become a dumping ground for international publishers’ second-rate back titles; we won’t necessarily enjoy competitively priced new releases here. Interestingly, Australian Booksellers’ Association took a supportive approach to parellel importation rights, even when booksellers would, at least theoretically, benefit from the lifting of this measure.
I’m aware that this is a post on Katter’s wish-list, and not parallel importation rights, so I don’t want to link to relevant discussions and academic papers on this topic, which are numerous and easily searchable, but it is a complex issue, and current agreement is that if the objective is to facilitate continuous provision of local intellectual content (say, in academic publishing, or literature) it is beneficial to provide some local market advantages, which are a norm in all English-language publishing markets as well as Europe and Asia.
Wilful @ 48,
I’m not sure that it is true that free trade is a prisoner’s dilemma. A country that unilaterally dismantles tariff barriers will gain some benefit overall. It is true, though, that some sectors within that country will bear an “unfair” cost.
we are many things besides ‘food consumers’
Who are the ‘we’ in that sentence? Speaking for myself, all I do with food is buy it, eat it, digest it and shit out the residual.
Tatyana @ 49 – well I disagree on various points but to avoid a derail I’ll wait until a parallel importation book thread comes up again
Andrew Reynolds @40: claiming that if the unit price is too low they can always get out of the business has all of the usual hallmarks of the hyper-rationalist ideologue. Thanks very much but my preference is to use some of the money you ought to be paying in tax to cross subsidise dairy farmers, for example, so that I can drink milk produced in Australia under health regulations that I trust rather than milk sourced from some other nation, produced under health regulations that don’t meet my needs (if they exist at all) and carted here at some carbon pollution expense. Same argument applies, in fact, with Chikita Bananas.
Sam @42: the farm gate price is not reflected in low prices to consumers so much as massive profits to the majors. It is called gouging.
I am all for trade barriers. I do not see any virtue in levelling the playing field if it results in Australian becoming unemployed, especially when the imported product is inferior to the Australian product.
Imported food is not subject to the same health regulations or contamination rules as Australian food. We are entering a period of food shortages and we know transport costs will increase as oil becomes scarce. Food imports advantage the food sellers mainly Coles and Woolworths. Interestingly the first orange imports in 1992 occurred because Westpac lent aggressively to a large orange grove then pulled their finance forcing them into recievership and the orange trees to wither.
What is the point of forcing farmers off the land because the farm gate prices are too low, like the National dairies in Tasmania. National is Japanese owned. Even China is buying Australian farms to feed its people.
Andrew kept your economic rationalist purity – personally I want to eat.
One of ther more perverse aspects of the Katter document is that he insists that the tariffs be implemented according to GATT Aricle XII
That articel is really of no use to him because it warrants tarriffs in order to to protect the nation’s Balance of Payments
This is an emergency provision rather than an open door to protectionism. Australia wouldn’t qualify.
Right after it comes Article XIII, the one about Non-discriminatory Administration of Quantitative Restrictions
He must assume others don’t know the GATT provisions or can’t be bothered reading.
I think it is prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone benefits (eventually) if everyone dismantles tariff walls, everyone loses if no one does. If we take the pain of allowing free entry, then we have to wear the negative adjustment costs without gaining the benefits of more exports. Other players have easy access to our markets and can enhance their strengths, while their weaknesses can be more affordably propped up.
Wilful, don’t you think the experiences of Australia over the past two decades suggest that there can be considerable benefits to unilateral tariff reductions?
benefits to unilateral tariff reductions?
Exactly. This debate was done and dusted years ago. Nobody, not even Kim Il Carr, believes in tariffs any more. (Well, apart from Bob Katter.)
@58, what “considerable benefits” would that be? Three manufacturing businesses closed down in my nearby town. Good, interesting jobs from a good variety of process work to die setters to tradesmen, engineers, R&D, management – gone. Jobs replaced and deskilled by two smelly meatworks, a warehouse and a stinking mushroom farm.
Dairy farmers nearly all gone. Two milk and cheese factories all but closed down. Orchards full of dying trees. Packing sheds and fruit processors closed down.
A little further away Mitsubishi closed down, the final nail in the coffin for many manufacturing businesses which were already suffering from cheap imports.
Some one please tell me exactly how we will all benefit from free trade, including all the environmental negatives of growth and goods criss crossing the globe for no good reason.
Robert and Sam, things change– just look at the state of the world economy. A country like Australia has to be flexible on issues like this. This isn’t about ideology this is about knowing exactly why open markets are good for your country and being able to realise when they’re not.
Food is going to be a hot topic in the coming decades and growing rice for export for marginal profit at high environmental cost is an example of the kind of business which may need a change of regulatory emphasis in the future. Which is all gobble-di-gook for subsidising farmers (so that they can have a decent life) and regulating their farming activities more (eg. putting a premium on the sustainable use of water in the Murray/Darling.)
The open market debate is a bit like the question– what does it all mean? Rolls well off-the-tongue but useless.
In my ecotopia we use tariff barriers for all sorts of excellent purposes: tariffs on food produced using non-union labour; tariffs on animal based food that is produced under industrial conditions that do not meet the highest standards (once, of course, we entrench decent regulations in Australia to clean up the horrendous conditions of factory farmed animals).
I’m all for free trade, of course, but free trade that meets particular standards. The idea that free trade is a realm somehow beyond social regulation is beyond doubt the most irrational, pre-modern reification of the market that has been ever foisted on moderns.
That Katter doesn’t grasp some of the administrative subtleties (see Fran above) is neither here nor there. He may prove an excellent shock trooper.
You’d think from all this hand wringing about this and that closed down that we had Depression-like unemployment of 30%. Except that it is 5+ %, one of the, if not the, lowest rates of unemployment in the developed world.
Not bad, considering how we’ve given it to ourselves in the tradesmen’s entrance with all this free trade, to hear Katter (and his supporters on this blog) tell it.
How anyone whose politics are to the left of, let’s say Kevin Andrews, could think anything positive about Bob Katter is a mystery.
Sam, please stop the sloganeering– the basis of Australia’s relative economic success is the emergence of the Chinese economy and their consumption of our mineral resources.
(Or rather, Clive and Twiggy’s mineral resources.)
Hope you were pouting when you wrote this!
Yes, personally most of the details are beyond me, but even I know that turning the clock back to the era before globalisation would be just as traumatic for the economy as any recession we had to have ever was, if not moreso.
But the debate on this bleeding heart pinko blog is pretty open and well informed.
Compare that to Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair not bothering to write a single post about the mad hatter’s macro- and micro-economic poilicies, other than road building projects. Bolt gives one measly off-the-cuff link to Judith Sloan at Catallaxy to take Katter apart on currency and trade.
So, protectionism is the one issue the leading conservative blogs don’t want to hit the Indies and Labor over the head with (and this is the perfect thing to hit all five anti-Abbott crossbenchers + Gillard over the head with, as they’re all on record encouraging Bob to speak his mind.)
The two Bs aren’t illiterate, and they’re heaping shit on Katter for garden variety pork, why not hit him with this?
Makes me wonder what they really believe about the permanent centre-Right majorities in those three bush electorates. Will have to see if the more sophisticated OO op-ed writers have anything detailed to say to the faithful about this.
Katters got a point about farmers negotiating with Coles and Woolworths. The farmers were in the same position as employees under work choices. Katter’s idea of giving farmers access to collective bargaining and other rights similar to those now enjoyed by workers has merit.
This is a sucker-trap for the Libs.
The Libs will play along with most of that. Labor will dig their heels in on certain ones but give in on others. As with Wilkie, he’ll find the latter more credible while Abbott scratches his head at the failure of a surefire winner.
I agree that farmers have a problem with the grocery duopoly.
I’m not convinced about Katter’s solution.
In any case, I wouldn’t be counting on the Liberals to do anything about oligopolies. They seem perfectly happy with private monopolies in the telecomms industry.
Agreed Robert M: The Libs have lots of mates (who will nonetheless leave them for a better deal).
Some of Bob’s solutions certainly are frought but they are now out there and the Coalition have to front up after years of neglect. As for the Government, it has a cornucopia of negotiating points.
Wiley old devil.
Nobody actually believes that unemployment is really at 5%, do they?
And as I hope I’ve made clear, I accept economic orthodoxy, as long as everyone remembers the assumptions and exceptions that are always forgotten.
But yeah, as someone said, the last time this sort of package made any sort of sense was about 1950.
“I’m all for free trade, of course, but free trade that meets particular standards.” Yes, one of the few encouraging changes over the last few years has been the step away from the ‘free-trade is good’ mantra we used to hear so much of.
The fair trade movement, slow food movement, localism, environmental sustainability, food security … all kinds of voices saying that free-trade has been used as a tool that benefits some, but doesn’t give us the lives we want and need.
Sam wrote: “You’d think from all this hand wringing about this and that closed down that we had Depression-like unemployment of 30%. Except that it is 5+ %, one of the, if not the, lowest rates of unemployment in the developed world.”
Paul Craig Roberts who used to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan wrote on Counterpunch recently that if unemployment was measured as it used to be in 1980 then the US unemployment rate would not be 10% but 20%. We’ve had similar changes here, not to mention how many unemployed are on the disability pension (I know several myself). It’s that old thing – lies, damned lies and statistics.
Russell @71, it would be very enlightening if unemployment figures were measured as they were in the 1980s. It would certainly make governments much less complacent about unemployment in this country, I think.
I reckon the sleeper in the Katter list is the Wild Rivers legislation