Isherwood: Double the tariffs, save the economy

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release 27th of February 2009

Isherwood: Double the tariffs, save the economy

“If we can’t even manufacture our own undies in this country, what the hell have we come to?” Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood asked today.

“Why does the Rudd government want to shut down clothing manufacturing?

“Don’t give us all the hand-wringing, crocodile tears and feigned anger, Mr Rudd and Mr Carr—you are the ones pushing ahead with tariff cuts in the middle of an economic collapse, so you are the ones driving clothing manufacturing offshore.”

Mr Isherwood called on the government to immediately halt its tariff reduction spree, and instead double the 17.5 per cent tariff on clothes, to not just save clothing manufacturing industry jobs, but to create more manufacturing jobs, and begin the re-industrialisation of the Australian economy.

“Everything we were force-fed about the benefits of free trade, by governments from Hawke and Keating on, was garbage,” he charged.

“All it has done is send the world—including China—bankrupt, so now each nation’s government must take the necessary measures to get their economies producing for their people’s needs.

“We must learn from history: in World War II John Curtin and Ben Chifley transformed our economy in a few years from a grazing/mining backwater into a modern manufacturing powerhouse.

“As Trade Minister from 1949-1970, the great Country Party leader John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen consolidated that transformation through comprehensive protectionist measures.

“Since then, the wankademic economists and political leaders babbled from the same script about ‘inefficient industries’ and ‘consumer costs’ to justify slashing tariffs, and look where it’s got us—an unpayable $1 trillion foreign debt, a household debt to annual income ratio of 175 per cent—one of the highest in the world, a dangerous vulnerability in our dependence upon China to buy our resources and manufacture our consumer goods (neither of which it is reliable for anymore), and an economic breakdown crisis worse than the 1930s Depression.

Mr Isherwood also took a swipe at the unions who are attacking the Pacific Brands’ executive salaries:

“By attacking executive salaries and not free trade, Sharan Burrow and the ACTU are covering for the Rudd government,” accused the CEC National Secretary.

“The sad truth is the union movement is also complicit in these job losses—they sold their members out by going along with free trade too; worse, Sharan personally received copies of our book, What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression as far back as 2001, and did nothing about it.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Raising tariffs is one of a series of measures which must be taken to save our economy, as part of what the American economist Lyndon LaRouche has proposed to be a New Bretton Woods reorganisation of the world economy—scrapping globalisation and free trade, and returning to fixed exchange rates and capital controls for financial regulation, tariffs for industry development, and national banking for long-term investment in large-scale infrastructure projects for economic reconstruction.”

ends

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