Home

A federally-registered independent political party

Follow the CEC on Facebook Follow @cecaustralia on Twitter Follow the CEC on Google +


Follow the CEC on Soundcloud












Printer-friendly version

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  21st of April 2011

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Isherwood: End free trade now, stop economic looting

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood declared today that the British free trade policies wiping out Australian manufacturing and looting our resources must end, now.

Australia has lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the past three years, and it is set to get worse. Ford Australia has announced it will lay off 240 workers in July, and Shell will chop more than 300 workers when it closes its Clyde oil refinery later in the year.

Contrary to what Australians have been told, the much-touted mining “boom” is not making up for the losses in manufacturing; in fact, it is making the crisis worse. In GDP terms, mining has expanded to a larger share of the economy than manufacturing, which has collapsed by more than half since the 1970s, but total employment in Australian mining is less than one-fifth of the number of people left employed in manufacturing.

The extent to which mining is actually looting Australia is a scandal. Free trade was imposed on Australia to boost mining exports, but those exports of overwhelmingly raw materials are robbing Australia of the far greater income that comes from manufactured exports; in the case of aluminium, manufactured products earn 120 times the raw material.

Furthermore, free trade is blocking even minimal flow-on benefits from mining activity. The metals fabricators of Western Australia are screaming—rightly—that local manufacturers are excluded from building the plant for local mines. According to the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) secretary Dave Oliver, 15 years ago, 85 per cent of mine inputs were manufactured in Australia, but today that has plummeted to barely more than 5 per cent. “Go down the Kwinana strip south of Perth where these metal fabricators are located and not much is happening,” he told the 16th-17th April Weekend Australian.

For example, local manufacturers missed out on the contract to build the plant for the $43 billion Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in WA—the biggest in Australia—which was awarded to Hyundai in South Korea, which, instead of the usual practice of making the giant plant on-site, which would create local jobs, are putting it together in South Korea, for loading onto giant ships. James England, a director of the Australian Steel Institute, which represents metal fabricators, told the Weekend Australian, “We’ve all had a gutful of the free-trade nonsense. There’s nothing free about it. We’ve got our hands tied behind our backs against countries that have a vastly different outlook on what is fair. We’d rather see fair trade than free trade.”

Mr Isherwood blasted the myths surrounding mining and free trade: “Everything about the mining boom is a fraud,” he said. “It isn’t earning us money; it is robbing us, because we are only exporting raw materials. The high wages are a ruse, which don’t make up for the exorbitant cost of living in mining areas, the anti-family fly-in fly-out practice, and the exploitative 12-hour shifts.

“Australia is not surviving free trade,” he said. “It is time to dump this British con—the mining ‘majors’ which are stealing us blind are either majority-owned by the British Crown itself (like Rio Tinto) or otherwise through the City of London—and we must return to tariff protection, which is how we developed an industrial economy in the first place, and the only way we’ll keep our industries.”

Mr Isherwood reiterated the CEC’s longstanding policy to nationalise the mining industry:

“Australia and the world need our resources, so it is imperative that we take control of those resources away from the British Crown’s mining cartel, and put them under national control. We need to realise the vision of the patriots of ‘old Labor’, last seen in the fight of the Whitlam government’s ministers Rex Connor and Jim Cairns to ‘buy back the farm’, which posed such a threat to the British Crown that the Queen sacked their government.”

He challenged, “If the AMWU, the AWU, the ASI and everyone else who say they are sick of the free trade destruction are serious, they’ll fight with the CEC.”

To find out more about the origins of British free trade, click here for a free copy of the feature-length DVD, 1932.

To buy a copy of What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression, click here.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.



Citizens Electoral Council © 2016
Best viewed at 1024x768.
Please provide technical feedback to webadmin@cecaust.com.au
All electoral content is authorised by National Secretary, Craig Isherwood, 595 Sydney Rd, Coburg VIC 3058.