“Bob Katter might not have a strong suite in rhetoric, but when it comes to foresight and a sense of Australia’s precariousness, he has gifts all too rarely found among his many critics.”
By Gary Scarrabelotti
The smart people just love to mock Bob Katter: his often tortured syntax, his sometimes eccentric behavior, and his patriotic politics. I don’t.
What I admire about Bob Katter is his clear-eyed, big-hearted way of loving his country. And now that he has re-floated an old idea of his of founding a new political party, he will come in for much condescension and contempt from the bien-pensant establishment in our media, academe and established political parties.
For me, two things stand out in Katter’s view of how Australia fares. First, he is has been ready to stick his neck out to defend Australian manufacturing – specifically, against the impact of globalisation. Secondly, on immigration, he has said the unsayable — that we should redirect immigration policy toward encouraging “migration from our traditional homelands.” (The Australian, 23 May 2011)
On this occasion, I’ll focus on the first of these: the decline of manufacturing. This was triggered by the floating of the Australian dollar and the abolition of foreign exchange controls in 1983, and the systematic dismantling of Australia’s tariff barriers.
It’s hard to deny the advantages that have accrued to Australia since Hawke and Keating floated “the Aussie” – least of all, by someone like me who, with each passing day, becomes more and more persuaded by the Austrian school of economics. But it is also undeniable that manufacturing in Australia has been all but destroyed since the Hawke-Keating revolution.
Now no country can be a serious country – capable, ultimately, of standing up for itself in a hard and violent world – if it cannot make things. The divide between makers and non-makers is one of the great defining realities. The makers make their future; non-makers have it made for them.
Australia’s huge distorting bias in favour of mining and the export of raw materials is empowering the makers — especially the great maker, China – while disempowering ourselves. We sell our natural endowment without adding much value, while we buy back manufactured goods – right down to bolts and nails – at prices we cannot match. Factories close down, some move off shore, workers lose jobs or redeploy, skills disappear.
True, the Australia-China trade account is running, for the time being, heavily in our favour. Some say this is a temporary aberration supported precariously by a raw materials bubble. Others say that it is a “paradigm shift” and that the days of cheap resources are over. But this does not gainsay my point. The fact remains that we are earning this surplus at the cost of stripping away our capacity to make the things that a modern society needs in order to preserve, when push comes to shove, both its modernity and its capacity to survive as a “stand alone” nation.
Yes, Australia progressed under Hawke and Keating, under Howard and Costello, under Rudd and Swan — and we still make progress under Gillard and Swan. We have become a thing to be envied: a Third World economy with a First World banking system attached.
No doubt about it, the older I get the more a free trader I become. Problem is — one cannot do free-trade freely in a mercantilist world. The statesman – as opposed to the ideologue — cannot afford to be a purist about free trade principles. There are the principles, then, there is the world.
This is the world in which the greatest mercantilist economy of all times has combined its vast “natural resource” of super cheap labour with a “rigged” currency to make it almost impossible to buy non-Chinese consumer goods in free markets. Such markets are neither genuinely free nor open.
Moreover, these unfree, semi-closed markets have been shaped by China not merely to its internal economic good but also its external strategic advantage – and, potentially, to our peril. Trade and currency policies have been forged into instruments of Chinese international power politics. There is nothing new or unusual about this. Our ally, the United States of America, did the same with brilliant success during the second half of last century. We cannot, assume, however, that Australia will flourish under a pax sinensis as it has under the pax americana.
However much we might admire Chinese civilisation for its history, culture, art, wisdom and skill, Australians should never delude themselves into believing that we can ever have a special relationship with China considered as a state. To the new generation of mandarins, Australia is a quarry, and nothing more. So ours would be a very great folly were we to oblige China by living up to its image of us. Think like a quarry, act like a quarry, and you will be treated like one: you will be dug out and then abandoned.
As my esteemed colleague, Wellington Boot, has argued in these columns, the great policy challenge for Australia is how to link the minerals boom to the re-industrialisation of the Australian economy.
Meantime, back in Canberra, and in the world of élite opinion, Bob Katter will be treated as a figure of fun both for his policies and gauche ways. When it comes, however, to foresight and a sense of our precariousness, he has the gift for identifying what will make us weak — and what great — all too uncommon among his many mocking critics.