In Australia? The neo-racist obsession with excluding asylum seekers would be a great start, although it's just one part of the toxic state of public discourse. Another might be the horrific waste of public money that is the long-dead-but-still-artificially-twitching car manufacturing industry. And don't get me started on transport policy.
> The neo-racist obsession with excluding asylum seekers would be a great start
In case you haven't realised, it's a wedge issue.
If you really care about refugees, wouldn't you want them to avoid endangering their lives by getting to Indonesia (probably a dangerous journey in itself), raising thousands of dollars (how do you make $5,000 in Indonesia? I'm guessing they have to do a few things which they really would rather not do), and then putting their lives in the hands of people smugglers (probably not for the first time).
They aren't coming directly. There are easier ways to get to a UN refugee camp.
It's a complex issue, if you care about refugees, and both sides have merits. On the other hand, if you don't care about refugees, the answer is pretty simple. So it's a wedge issue.
The left is split between the people who want to accept asylum seekers, and the people who think it's better to encourage them to go through the offshore process.
And you should note, Australia permanently resettles about 6 refugees per 100,000. Only Canada and NZ does better. The US resettles about 4. There's a few other countries which aren't totally shit, but most of the world is really really terrible about resettling refugees. Australia is one of the few countries which actually pulls its weight here.
And when fuel prices spike up and there is no manufacturing knowledge at the institutional (I mean business here not education) level will Australians have to put up with importing all vehicles at extortionist prices? What will happen when the luxury car import duties apply to all vehicles? Think of the public investment as a hedge against the Australian dollar losing value (which it will do if China tanks) and/or a steep rise in the cost of fuel (i.e. it becomes very expensive to import vehicles manufactured elsewhere).
Can't that argument be applied to most produces that are now produced in places like China? We aren't saying that Australia shouldn't have engineering and development skills in these areas. Manufacturing and assembly absolutely makes economic sense not to be done here, unless you are in favor of lowering the minimum wage.
That's not my argument, it costs money to transport goods to the market; in this case cars and trucks from Japan, Korea, and to a lesser extent US and Europe, to Australia. These goods have a mark up above and beyond the cost of manufacture (i.e. the profit), typically at a percentage. So the cost of shipping mined bauxite and iron ore to Japan, Korea, China, then manufacture, then shipping it back with the concomitant margins for all the players in between. Why not go back to manufacturing steel, aluminium, the parts then cars? In the end the cost of rebuilding that institutional knowledge will be so high that Australia is forever locked out of manufacturing; even if capital costs aside it would be profitable to do so.
Because despite the freighting costs a country like China can still make cheaper cars for our market. Even if the whole chain is here it is likely going to still be more expensive. If this wasn't the case then it wouldn't have been slowly dismantled over time.
My whole point is that this advantage that China has might be illusory, what if in 5 years time the balance of wages in China and the cost of fuel goes up? China moves to robots? Why not have robots in Australian factories with Australian know-how?
