Time to boycott Fairfax?

[jpblue1000]

Originally Posted by eb2monty

Spot on. We are the underdog. Beware the underdog.

Yeah Revenge of the Nerds style!

[Spinner77]

None of the guys I know who work in manufacturing are what I would call rich.

To provide high skill, high paying jobs, you have to have highly profitable growing companies.

Of course in Australia, this is not happening in manufacturing. Elsewhere it is. For example, Apple is a manufacturing company. The software is just there to give life to the machines.

The following fact from jpblue shows we have a huge problem:

Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, sales people, financial services etc

These are the guys making the money. I don't know about engineers, frankly. It is not my impression that they are minting the stuff (except in mining). But doctors, lawyers and sales staff are not the stuff that are going to make this country great and everyone better off. Doctors feed off the taxpayer teat (am I allowed to say this?). A lot of lawyers do too (public defenders). Not a huge future in that, do you think?

The problem is that the solution is far from clear.

A lot of Australia's effort over the past 30 years or so has been in trying to get freer trade, since there is no trade bloc nearby that we have a natural fit with (unlike the EU, and even NAFTA). We have a small domestic market.

I remember John Howard having very high hopes for the free trade agreement with the US. It has been a big disappointment, serving mainly to protect US intellectual property interests, and doing Sweet Fanny Adams for us.

It is next to impossible to have a viable export manufacturing industry, with wildly fluctuating exchange rates. When the dollar was floated, nobody foresaw this. The decision then was to float, rather than take the strain on highly fluctuating interest rates.

It is interesting that around the same time, Hong Kong decided to tie its currency to the USD, at the risk of high interest rate changes. Note how the Chinese, wanting to export, have kept their currency closely tied to the USD (with a slow increase in its value over time).

We seem to put our faith in solutions that worked a couple of generations ago, like high unskilled immigration. Will it work now? You dare not even ask the question. It's impolite.

When opportunities arise to invest, we prefer to spray the proceeds up against the wall. Not only in pink batts and so on. Under the previous government, rivers - floods in fact - of revenue went in tax cuts. What's to show for it now?

Where do we start? Here's a hint. A friend's daughter completed a university degree in hospitality and tourism. She is a smart and attractive girl. The best job she could get after that was as an airline hostie.

Now here is the contrast.

A couple of years ago, I was working in southern China, and staying at a decent internation-chain hotel. There were not a lot of westerners around.

One day I was surprised to find at the front desk a German girl. She explained to me that she was completing a qualification in hospitality at a German polytechnic. It was not a degree. The Germans don't give out degrees for that sort of thing. But, as part of the course, the institution used its contacts with the industry to give the students work experience overseas, and the opportunity to get respectable references for future employment.

Spot the difference? In Australia, the university's interest finishes when they receive the last fee payment.