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Havachat: Free, fair or foolish? The Australian-US FTA - Day 1

By Doug Cameron and Alan Oxley - posted Monday, 26 May 2003


Job Loss

The US National Association of Manufacturers is predicting a $US 1.8 billion a year gain for United States manufacturing under a USFTA. Some of the biggest gains for the United States will be made in the automotive industry - an industry that provides tens of thousands of jobs all over Australia. A USFTA together with our rising dollar will directly threaten those jobs. The combination of our rising dollar, loss of government industry support mechanisms, and tariffs through a Free Trade Agreement will also mean reduced investment in Australian manufacturing.

Between 1989 and 1997 free trade agreements with the United States and Mexico cost the Canadians 270,000 jobs - the majority of them in manufacturing - what can Australian manufacturing workers and their communities expect?

There are a lot more issues to cover - the things we are being asked to give up; lack of parliamentary oversight of treaties - but we can talk about those later in the week. Over to you Alan.

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Doug

From: Alan Oxley
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2003 16:00
Subject: Re: Australia should not become the 51st state of America

Doug,

Free trade promotes open societies. Australia is a successful society because it has always been open: open to trade (it could not have developed without imports or creating export industries); open to investment (foreign investment funded our first export industries: wool and wheat), and above all open to people. Australia is a migrant society.

Being open has not undermined Australia's culture. When most contact (trade, migration, investment) was with Britain, we remained firmly Australian. Today cultural exposure to the US is great (but less than it was with Britain for a century) as well as to many other cultures and Australia's sense of cultural independence has never been stronger.

Openness does not suit all societies. But Australia has grown and thrives on it. An FTA with the US will not significantly magnify Australian exposure to US culture any more than this process will continue as the global influence of the US grows. Some Australians may dislike this, but it is a reality and most Australians seem comfortable with it.

Openness has been fundamental to Australia's success. Only when we closed ourselves off to the world, as we did when we increased protection of manufacturing in the seventies, did we get into trouble. Protection saps national wealth, and kills industries. We nearly lost our automobile and steel industries in the eighties because we sheltered them too long from world markets.

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We are now a successful exporter of manufactures. One quarter of all exports are manufactures. Many said this was never possible. We export Magnas (and soon Monaros) to the US, steel to Asia and fast ferries and scientific instruments to Europe.

There are fewer workers today in manufacturing, but that is the impact of technology - a worldwide phenomenon. The services sector is now the big employer in industrialized economies. Even so, exporting creates well-paid jobs in manufacturing. Analyses by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian workers in businesses that export are paid more and have more security.

Australia's trade barriers are low, so we have few barriers to remove if US companies are to operate in Australia on the same terms as Australian companies. That is the basic point of a Free Trade Agreement.

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About the Authors

Doug Cameron is National Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

Alan Oxley is the former ambassador to the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs and Chairman of the Australian APEC Studies Centre.

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Doug Cameron
All articles by Alan Oxley
Related Links
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union
Australia-US Trade Agreement home page
Dept of Foreign Affaris and Trade resources
Download the findings (Word doc, 319kb)
www.worldgrowth.org
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