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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  27th of January 2012

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
 

Oh what a feeling… TARIFFS

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s free trade policies have cost the jobs of hundreds of Toyota workers who live in her own electorate, and they will shut down the whole car industry unless her government re-enacts tariff protection for Australian manufacturing, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood stated today.

“Australian industry is dying the death of a thousand cuts because the political leaders who say they support the car industry, really support the very thing that is killing the car industry—free trade.”

“The car industry was developed under the stewardship of protectionist political leaders such as Labor’s Ben Chifley and the great Country Party Trade and Industry Minister John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, who turned Australia from an agrarian backwater into an industrial powerhouse,” he said. “Most importantly, the car industry is the centre of our machine tool capacity; machine tools are the machines that make machines—it is our machine tools that give us the ability to make things, anything. Beginning in the late 1960s our machine tool manufacturing was destroyed by free trade. What machine tool capacity we have left is concentrated in the car industry—lose the industry, and we might as well suck our thumbs.”

Isherwood said the car industry, and all Australian manufacturing, was the victim of a deliberate plot to strip Australia of its industries and sovereignty.

“Free trade was invented by the elites who ran the British Empire precisely to crush any moves toward national economic development in the colonies they ruled.

“No nation has ever developed under free trade,” he insisted. “The great industrial economies of the world—the U.S., Germany, Japan, and even Australia before the Hawke-Keating carnage—all developed under heavy tariff protection. Abraham Lincoln spent his entire political life fighting against free trade, whilst championing tariffs. In the Civil War, the British Empire sided with the free trade, slavery-based Confederacy, and orchestrated Lincoln’s assassination, but not before his protectionist policies launched America on the greatest burst of economic development in the history of the world, characterised by a surge in the size and living standard of its population.

“Australians who were inspired by Lincoln’s America, and who aspired to have a sovereign nation, knew we had to have tariffs to develop our own industries, or we’d forever remain a colonial quarry to be looted by British financial speculators.”

Isherwood cited the 1929 Tariff Board’s “Brigden Report”, entitled, The Australian Tariff: An Economic Enquiry, which examined Australia’s prospects under protectionism vs. free trade, and found that free trade would limit Australia to being a raw materials economy, and substantially restrict its population growth. This report influenced the protectionist commitment of one of Australia’s greatest champions of manufacturing, John McEwen, whose adviser in the 1950s, Jack Campbell, summarised Brigden’s findings on the impact of free trade: “Australia would be a country where there would be a handful of people—I think they said 5 millions—and they would grow wool and beef and mine lead. There would be no manufacturing industry and the maximum the country could support would be 5 million who would live at an extraordinarily high level of average income because they were the world’s best at it. Those who were lucky to have a slice of it would do tremendously well.” The Brigden committee rejected free trade and recommended protectionist measures, and under the protectionist policies of the Curtin-Chifley Labor government in WWII, and continued by John McEwen in the 1950s and 1960s, Australia’s industries flourished.

Isherwood continued, “When Hawke, Keating, Howard, John Hewson, Ross Garnaut, Bernie Fraser and Macquarie Bank conspired to float the dollar, deregulate banks and slash tariffs, they knew they would destroy Australia’s manufacturing industries, including the car industry—that was their intention.

“Consequently, the situation that now confronts the car industry is clear-cut: it is doomed, unless the Gillard government denounces this free trade treachery, and goes back to tariffs. Otherwise, Gillard may say she’s sympathetic to the hundreds of sacked Toyota workers who live in her electorate, but she’s lying.”

He concluded, “I know Australians hate losing their industries, but they can’t get demoralised and accept it as inevitable. Our nation won’t survive if this continues, so if you don’t like it, join the CEC and fight it.”

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s blueprint for a national infrastructure program which would regenerate our industries, “The Infrastructure Road to Recovery”.
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