You were robbed. Stolen from. You had your heritage and your prosperity deliberately taken away from you, and it was done right under your nose and you were lied to about it.
You may have heard the myth that Australian car manufacturing died because of unions and because of the high wages caused by those unions. This argument is attractive to many because a lot of people can comprehend why that could be the case. But it makes no sense logically. Think about it: Australia is a massive country, with heaps of resources, and a small spread-out population. We need cars to get places. Because we have a small population spread out over a large area, we have no choice, but for the majority of people to own cars to do everything from shop, to work, to socialize. So, we need cars and we need people to buy them.
If those cars are built in Australia, by Australians, from Australian resources, and the workers are paid in Australian dollars, who spend their money in the Australian economy, you have a closed system, don’t you? The money flows through the economy. The unions will be able to push for wages that make living in Australia possible, but the production of cars will continue to be necessary, so car makers will be able to demand a reasonable premium to make cars, but the money they make from those cars will go back into the economy, and the system will sustain itself over time. Like other countries, the government will subsidize the industry by making up government vehicle fleets of Aussie cars, and this will to go back into the economy and aid the production of the cars.
Of course, the system was not totally closed, that is not my argument. But, if only Aussie-made cars are being made, bought and sold, then how can high wages bankrupt the car industry? They can’t. You need an outside competitor to achieve this. In a closed system, you may end up paying higher prices, because of higher wages, but those wages will balance out within the wider economy because that money is part of the same system. Higher-paid workers spend more in the economy, right? This is why people are still buying homes, even though builders are making wages that car manufacturers would have once dreamed of, because their services are in such high demand, that they can command high wages. Therefore, high wages are not the problem, interference in the system is the problem.
When I mention interference in the system, some people might think I mean subsidies. But all countries with a car manufacturing industry subsidize that sector, and Australia’s subsidies to our car industry were modest compared to other countries. The problem was not the unions. Unions and collective bargaining are only a detriment if Australian workers need to compete against foreign labour which is far cheaper, and that is exactly what happened. This is what really killed our car manufacturing industry, along with much of the rest of our manufacturing, and this process was guided and deliberate.
It is here where I ask you have you heard of the Lima Declaration?
The Lima Declaration was a 1975 United Nations agreement that many countries, including Australia, signed up to which had the express intention of moving western manufacturing to poorer developing countries. The stated aim was to bring equality to all countries,
“5. Recognizing the urgent need to bring about the establishment of a new international economic order based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence and co-operation, as has been expressed in the Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, in order to transform the present structure of economic relations,…”[1]
Lima Declaration and Plan of Action on Industrial Development and Co-operation
The way this “equality” was meant to be achieved was by taking from the West and giving to developing countries so that they could catch up,
“36. That developing countries with sufficient means at their disposal should give careful consideration to the possibility of ensuring a net transfer for financial and technical resources to the least developed countries:
37. That special emphasis should be laid on the need of the least developed countries for the establishment of production facilities involving a maximum utilization of local human resources, the output of which meets identified material and social requirements, thus assuring a convergence between local resource use and needs as well as offering adequate employment opportunities;…”
Ibid.
Notice that? The UN was asking for governments, including our Australian government, to transfer our own economic and technical resources to these countries so that they could do what our countries used to do, make things. Various measures were outlined to achieve this transfer,
“59. The developed countries should adopt the following measures:
(a) Progressive elimination or reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers, and other obstacles to trade, taking into account the special characteristics of the trade of the developing countries, with a view to improving the international framework for the conduct of world trade. Adherence to the fullest extent possible to the principle of the “standstill” on imports from developing countries and recognition of the need for prior consultation where feasible and appropriate in the event that special circumstances warrant a modification of the “standstill”;
(b) Adoption of trade measures designed to ensure increased exports of manufactured and semi-manufactured products including processed agricultural products from the developing to the developed countries:
(c) Facilitate development of new and strengthen existing policies, taking into account their economic structure and economic, social and security objectives, which would encourage their industries which are less competitive internationally to move progressively into more viable lines of production or into other sectors of the economy, thus leading to structural adjustments within the developed countries, and redeployment of the productive capacities of such industries to developing countries and promotion of a higher degree of utilization of natural resources and people in the latter;
(d) Consideration by the developed countries of their policies with respect to processed and semi-processed forms of raw materials, taking full account of the interests of the developing countries in increasing their capacities and industrial potentials for processing raw materials which they export;
(e) Increased financial contributions to international organizations and to government or credit institutions in the developing countries in 12 order to facilitate the promotion or financing of industrial development. Such contributions must be completely free of any kind of political conditions and should involve no economic conditions other than those normally imposed on borrowers;…”
Ibid.
The UN was asking our government to lower tariffs that protected Australian manufacturing, so as to help foreign manufacturers compete in our market. They wanted us to become dependent on food from overseas, and also on other products and raw materials made or partially processed overseas. They also expected us to move our own manufacturing to these foreign countries, give advantages to foreign manufacturing, and then use our own sovereign money to increase this process.
This is what killed our Australian car industry. This is what killed many other parts of our manufacturing industry. It was not the unions, it was a deliberate top-down strategy to move money, resources, manpower and even technology overseas,
“(j) The developing countries should he granted access to technological know-how and advanced technology, whether patented or not, under fair, equitable and mutually acceptable conditions, taking into account the specific development requirements of the recipient countries;
(k) Appropriate measures, including consideration of the establishment of an industrial and technological information bank, should be taken to make available a greater flow to the developing countries of information permitting the proper selection of advanced technologies;
(I) International conventions on patents and trade marks should he reviewed; and all aspects of the question of their revision, including inter a/ia additional provisions of special benefit to the developing countries, should be studied through the work of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), with appropriate contributions from UNCTAD and other interested United Nations bodies, in order that they may become an appropriate instrument to assist the developing countries in the transfer and development of technology;…”
Ibid.
In other words, Australia, and all the other developed countries that signed the Lima Declaration, were being asked to agree to hamstring their own manufacturing industries and pour money, intellectual expertise, and more into third-world countries so that they could compete with our manufacturing and run it out of business, under the shroud of “equality”. The stated goals were the movement of our own manufacturing to these foreign countries. This was not a byproduct of the agreement, it was the intention. And our country over-delivered. This was clear theft from the West, by Western leaders and businessmen, dressed up in social justice language. Isn’t that always the way?
They even stated their goals to push more women into the workforce to achieve their levelling of all societies across the world,
“30. That in order to render really effective the full utilization of their available human resources, conditions should be created by the developing countries which make possible the full integration of women in social and economic activities and, in particular, in the industrialization process, on the basis of equal rights…”
Ibid.
Feminism was never about equality and justice. It was always about mobilizing the “human resource” potential of all nations so that those at the top could profit from all countries equally. That was the only equality they really cared about.
The whole document reads like a quasi-Marxist declaration of how the elites will achieve “equality” throughout the world. But you could also read it as a grand crony-capitalist strategy outlining how Western elites could gain access to cheaper workforces around the world. Which is precisely what happened. Western countries lost a lot of their advantage over the rest of the world, and now if you turn on the Australian media on any given night, you are likely to hear about how China’s rapidly growing technology and industrial base creates security concerns for the United States and Australia. But the very elites who complain about this are the very elites who created the problem, or at least their heirs. We gave that technology and know-how to these countries, and are now falling behind as a result.
But now you know. Now you know how you were robbed, how every Western country was robbed by its own leaders, and how our prosperity and intellectual heritage were given away. It was not an accident, it was a deliberate strategy of picking apart Western manufacturing and technology and giving it to countries that are now leaping ahead of our own.
[5] Ibid.
