This photo of a Chinese made shirt is a reminder, gentle reader, of the profound changes in our relationships with the rest of the world that have emerged in my lifetime.
When I was growing up in the fifties (yep - I'm really old) most of the clothes I wore were made in Australia.
Back then the rag trade was well established locally.
In Sydney, for example, there were nine thousand (mostly women) working in clothing and tailoring, over four thousand in dress and hat-making, and about eight thousand in shirt making.
Today, if all clothing made in China, Bangladesh or Vietnam vanished overnight, there would be a lot of naked Australians wandering about.
Then there's motor cars. My first memory of our family car was a green 1952 Austin A40.
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| Our A40's number was Q484451. |
Then there was a Vanguard Spacemaster.
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| Our Vanguard. Rego was Q645324 (rear only). |
Both these were British imports, but by then an Australian industry had developed on the heels of Ben Chifley's push for local manufacturing, and later we owned a series of Australian made Holdens.
My first non-Australian made purchase was a Renault, but since then I've been buying cars from Japan or Korea. The coalition government pretty much chased local manufacturing away in 2013 because it was ideologically opposed to both unionised workforces and supporting local manufacturing, and there hasn't been a local industry since.
The same phenomenon has occurred in the full range of manufacturing industries, to the point where not very much is made here. We have become a country where we confine ourselves to digging minerals up and exporting them, only to have them converted to manufactured goods offshore which we then buy as imports.
Manufacturing contributes only 6.3% to Australia's GDP, and export earnings through manufacturing are 11% of the total. Only 6.8% of the Australian workforce is employed in manufacturing.
We are almost entirely relying on imports to maintain our lifestyle. This is perhaps not a large issue, except that opportunities for careers in the sector have shrunk, but I find the fact that we are almost entirely reliant on imports for vital commodities such as transport fuels pretty alarming.
Australia holds about a month of fuel supply onshore. Under International Energy Agency rules, we need to hold 90 days in reserve. We do, but most of that 90 days worth is actually tanked overseas!
Perhaps I'm succumbing to some kind of nationalist paranoia, but I find these facts difficult to accept. We seem to have forgotten our recent history.
Perhaps the election of an avowedly isolationist US administration will encourage us to take a look at our national sovereignty.
We are, let's face it, on our own.
