If you had to Google 'protectionism' just now: Don't feel bad. Tariffs, protectionism and free trade are just not things the Australian Parliament has fought about in earnest for decades now.
Much as it often seems that the principal endeavour of Australia n politics is the identification and plumping of new and juicy topics over which to brawl like a pack of cage-starved circus weasels, there is one thing — quite a big thing, really — which used to be a major fissure in Australia n politics, and now just pretty much isn't.
Cameron is pretty much still where he was on the board. But the Labor Party — even despite the fact that it's now led by Cameron's long-term friend and NSW Left ally Anthony Albanese — hasn't budged.It was not ever thus. We used to fight about tariffs in Australia. In fact, for the first decade of our federation, it was THE fight.
In our first decade, we swore in nine prime ministers, in an all-consuming and ongoing dust-up that rent state from state, drove countless double-crossings and dirty tricks, and burned through even more prime ministers than we did in the Disposable Decade of Rudd/Gillard/Rudd/Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison.
And after Bob Hawke laid out a schedule of tariff cuts in 1991, the pattern of trade barrier removal continued not just through the subsequent Labor prime ministership of Paul Keating but through the ensuing prime ministership of John Howard and through subsequent governments who have signed free trade agreements and paid attention to multilateral principles of free trade and whose opponents have resisted – for the most part – making partisan hay from the hardship that is undeniably occasioned...
There are plenty of reasons, Australians may reason, why our nation might be exempted from the threatened next round of Trumpian tariffs, on stuff like aluminium and pharmaceuticals.We are not a gateway to America for either opioids or asylum seekers. We have a trade surplus with America. A TRADE SURPLUS! Our biggest exports to the USA are (and here I reproduce faithfully the US Embassy's exact assessment: Financial services. Gold. Sheep and goat meat. Transportation services. Vaccines.
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