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Great post smurf, absolutely what we need to do, maintaining our living standards by selling everything in the house isn't sustainable.Strongly agreed.
That said, it is also very clear that Australia cannot sensibly remain so closely tied to either China, the US or any other single country. This crisis has made that reality very clear.
My expectation is that Australia's economy will ultimately emerge stronger because of this. We'll be forced to diversify both geographically and in terms of activity and neither is a bad thing. Our business model of simply selling what we've got to whoever walks in the door, which isn't far removed from prostitution as a concept, has reached its end point.
Short term the downside is mass unemployment, investors losing money and massive disruption.
Long term here's the springboard to put Australians back to work in actual higher value industries and to fix the problems we've been sweeping under the rug in the great race to the bottom. Problems like hospital funding, the natural environment including issues of pollution and emissions, house prices and so on are all ultimately products of the economic race to the bottom we've been engaged in.
If I was to try and fit our predicament to any previous historic example then once the virus is sorted I'd pick 1945. A war won and a focus on rebuilding our industries as the obvious path forward both practically and economically.
We have filled our obligation to the Lima agreement, now we need to get fair value for money for our resources, as happened in the 1960 where mining companies had to build furnaces and smelters to gain access to the minerals.
If the companies don't want to build furnaces etc, tax them on volume so that the money can be used to build industries, like a new bloody serum laboratory for a start.
