When asked about making things here in Australia at the press club today neither Swan or Hockey had any answers.

Swan rambled on about its broadband network being the panacea for every problem whilst Hockey said that our service industries was more or less a substitute for manufacturing anything.

Can you believe this !!

Who the hell wants our over priced service industries ?? What a croc of ...

nail I ask a question.

You want to set up a company making widgets.


You can rent industrial space at $50per sq metre and employ workers on $25 an hour, 13 sick days, 9% super 4 weeks annual leave, 12.5% leave loading and double time for any over time, your widgets cost $1 each to make.

OR

You can have a free factory in Schenzen employ chinese workers for $2USD a day who will work 16 hours a day 28 days a month, pay no overtime no annual leave no super annuation and no sick leave. Your widgets now cost 1cent each to make.


Where are you going to set up your business????


See most people have no economic sense, I have seen first hand through my business that scores of manafacturing operations have closed up and moved offshore, workers who are now filling into my business to refinance their loans, who are looking for work after being laid off, they didn't get retrenched the factory went into rcvrshp and no employee benefits get paid.

See there is no financial sense in setting up a manafacturing gig in Oz, all the bullshit you have to go through with local council, garbage from zoning to advertising, paying wages for employees who are sick or lazy, Purely speaking from a business management POV there is no sense setting up in Oz, there are just too many stupid hurdles and teh costs are astronomical, even a simple phone line for a business address costs several thousand dollars if its a new premesis.

thje biggest problem our country faces is unemployment, because for every worker who loses his job the gov goes from collecting $150 a week in tax to having to fork out $300 a week minimun in benefits, a $22000 turn around for teh gov. Now at some point we'll hit the tipping point where centrelink benefits out strip income tax revenue.

We need to do everything possible to ensure jobs stay here, and unfortunately with the way it is and has been and will continue to be, nothing will change, just today a boat manafacturing business closed its doors sending 40 welders out of work.

this country is heading for oblivion see where we are at in 10 years.

aussiefree2ride wrote on Aug 9^th, 2010 at 3:57pm:


LOL...methinks you should let 'young' (as well as older) people decide that for themselves - when/if they are ever in the envious position of needing to delegate work that is, for whatever reason, beyond their capacity to personally peform...

freediver wrote on Aug 9^th, 2010 at 2:09pm:


Then why did they hand over 180 million to Holden for its so called "Green" car which is about as likely as hens teeth

The Government doesn't have to make anything. They just need to create the right environment to encourage manufacturing instead of wasting billions of tax payers dollars to fuel a property bubble which just burdens the country with yet more useless debt

Many first world workers are still thinking of themselves in terms of third world manufacturing labour. The unions encourage them by maintaining the rhetoric of the 40s and 50s. But there is no competition with real third world workers. No country can compete with SE Asia in terms of labour costs. Many 'second world' countries (middle east, Southers and Eastern Europe, Latin AMerica) have much bigger unemployment problems.

First world workers have to think in first world terms, they have to find employment in areas where cheap third world labour can't compete with them. Their parents have encourage them to stay on at school, to excel in their studies, to leave the mass production iof disposable widgets to the poor of the world. There is no point in supporting mass prouction industries that caneasily move around the world because thy can be carried out almost anywhere.

Australia, a small country in terms of population, needs to focus on its human capital and make it as high quality as possible. It makes no economic sense to sqander first world human capital on aspiring to nothing more than third world labour.