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The Abbott Government

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The general concensus is that FTA are essential for Australia to expand its non mineral export base. How these are arrived at is well above my level of knowledge, the economic positives and negatives would be weighed up by our fiscal public servants.

Both sides of politics are calling for free trade adreements, so I would think there is net value to Australia.
But hey unlike some, I don't profess to be an expert on all subjects, just make observations from my personal experiences and work background.

Generally though I believe that most politicians, from both sides ,want to try and improve Australia for Australians.
What differs is the general thrust of how they move Australia forward, they impliment change when attaining office and are judged at the next election.
What is happening at the moment and happened with the last Government is, they are being forced into adopting minority party policies, rather than back their own beliefs.
This in turn gives the public a lack of confidence in the Governments resolve to carry out the reforms they were voted in for.

IMO it isn't good for either Party and gives people like Palmer and Milne far too much credibility, which disproportionately exceeds their voter base.
 
What is happening at the moment and happened with the last Government is, they are being forced into adopting minority party policies, rather than back their own beliefs.
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Exactly so, and it could be argued that the Howard government pandered to a minority party (The Nationals) by agreeing to a free trade deal essentially benefitting farmers at the expense of other sectors like manufacturing and consumers of patent medicines.
 

Do you have some supporting links of the dribble that is coming out of your mouth Rumpy?

Don't you understand the Nationals are in coalition with the Liberals and been for many years....They are one big happy family.

Not like Labor and the Greens....married one day and divorced the next day......or was it a marriage of convenience?
 

We've had the AUS USA FTA for over a decade now. So far there's been no jobs boom from it for Australia. Our deficit with the USA has increased. Most of our exports that would benefit from an FTA are still waiting another decade or so before the prohibitive tariffs are reduced.

The problem with FTAs is each has different clauses and paper work involved. So for a SME wanting to use the current FTAs we have they need to manage extremely complex ROOs to confirm they are complying. It might be of benefit to large multinationals but not so much to the majority of Aussie businesses.

FTAs can also cause a loss of income to the country. The sticker price may drop, but if we've started to buy from a higher cost country due to an FTA, well the consumer pays less but then Govt tariff revenue has take a much bigger hit and we're left paying higher taxes to cover the short fall. Diversion of trade happens quite a lot with FTAs.

If you'd bothered to read any of the FTAs you'd see that most of the agricultural exports for Australia have anywhere from a decade to 2 decades before they provide much in the way of benefits to local farmers. The Japan FTA was very bad in this respect.

As for the article you posted, those cost reductions are available via tarrif reduction. You don't need an FTA to do that. We can, and did under the Hawke and Keating Govts, unilaterally cut tariffs on a lot of imports. Studies show that the country doing this benefits more than countries maintaining high trade barriers.
 
sydboy007 said:
AUS-USA FTA has caused the extension of patents on drugs to last years longer than in NZ and a lot of other countries.
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My understanding is that the price difference is still considerable on many drugs long out of patent in either country. Can you provide any detail about particular drugs which have what patent life in Australia?
(I'm not arguing with you: just interested because I don't think it's only to do with any AUS/USA FTA.
 

This is where we were foolish: from Wikipedia

Intellectual property

The provisions of the AUSFTA in Ch 17 required Australia to offer stronger protection to American intellectual property. In particular, the minimum term of copyright was extended to 70 years after the author's death. Most economists and others interested in intellectual property issues regarded this as undesirable. A number of prominent American economists took the same view in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Other key changes included:
special copyright term extension for photographs
broader definition of technological protection measures, narrow exceptions, and review process
protection of temporary copies
stronger protection of electronic rights management information
protection of pay television broadcasts
safe harbour provisions for Internet Service Providers
protection of performers' economic and moral rights in respect of sound recordings
broader civil and criminal offences

For a discussion of the copyright changes, see Rimmer, M. "Robbery Under Arms: Copyright Law and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement"[7]
Article 17.10.4 of the AUSFTA also required Australian legislation under which the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration had to notify a pharmaceutical patent holder of intended market entry by a generic competitor. The Australian academic Thomas Alured Faunce has argued that this could facilitate the rent prolongation strategy known as 'evergreening.' [8]
 
Ah, thanks, Rumpole. That's what was in the back of my mind from a Radio National program, I think "Background Briefing" of a few months ago. It was a one hour program on the reasons why Australians are paying so much more than New Zealanders for drugs, and as far as I can recall, the patents issue wasn't even mentioned.

I have a good friend who owns a string of pharmacies throughout Qld and my jaw just drops at his profits!
Chemists receive minimal focus from consumers in terms of how much money they make. Perhaps the white jacket and avuncular, concerned disposition belies any notion of their being motivated mostly by huge profits.
 

I wonder what happened to the idea of pharmacies in supermarkets ? Was the idea for supermarkets to cash in on those huge profits or actually provide a bit of competition for the regular pharmacy and a better deal for the consumer?

Sounds like the pharmacies could do with more competition.
 
sptrawler said:
The general concensus is that FTA are essential for Australia to expand its non mineral export base. How these are arrived at is well above my level of knowledge, the economic positives and negatives would be weighed up by our fiscal public servants.
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The Productivity commission doesn't see FTAs as a panacea for true reform

“Trade agreements can distort *comparative advantage between nations and consequently reduce efficient resource allocation”…

Building on its 2010 report which found the benefits to national income accruing from bilateral and regional trade agreements was likely to be modest, the report says another weakness is rules of origin.

“Such complexity adds to the *compliance costs for firms engaging in trade . . . the origin requirements and the complexity of rules are likely to impede competition”…

Alan Mitchell in the left wing AFR had to say about the JAP-AUS FTA

Almost two-thirds of the potential lift in Australia’s national income would come from the increase in Japanese exports to Australia. It would come as a result of the investment and productivity gains generated by more import competition…

They will…force Australian producers to innovate and lift productivity to survive…

Tariff-free imports are a key strength of the FTA with Japan, but they also expose the fundamental weakness of all bilateral FTAs. Australia can have all the cheap manufactured goods it wants, just as Japan can get all the cheap food it likes, by unilaterally tearing down the remaining barriers to trade.

Yet both nations deny their economies the bulk of the benefits of genuine trade reform while they spoon out market access to one trading partner after another, in stupid, long drawn-out negotiations.

I'm just waiting for Abbott to well and truly sell us out by signing the TPP. It's a Christmas wishlist for big pharma and the movie studios. Note the Govt is holding alld ealings on the TPP in secret and so far has provided very little info on the negotiations.

Oligopoly Robb has said that Australia is prepared to give ground on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) powers – which allow multinational companies to sue the government – in return for “substantial market access” in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade minister, Andrew Robb, said.

Robb predicted the TPP would be a “platform for 21st-century trade rules” as negotiations were being watched closely by other countries but “ambitious market access” was fundamental to its successful completion.

Speaking at the conclusion of the latest round of talks, Robb confirmed he was negotiating on the controversial ISDS clause in return for market access for Australian exporters and that “substantial progress” had been made on the issue.

So before going on to cheer trade distorting FTAs maybe have a read at https://wikileaks.org/tpp/ and see just how much we're likely to be sold out by the Govt in their rush to do a deal.
 

I find the more local pharmacies provide excellent service, especially when compared to priceline or chemist warehouse.


No Govt is willing to take on the Pharmacy Guild when they just have to threaten running a scare campaign. Just imagine how many pensioners they have calling their local MP, or early mothers fearful of losing their local support. Makes Abbott's carbon tax scare campaign look like noco's one man fight against the menacing fabian hordes that are about to descent upon us like a plague of locusts.
 
So before going on to cheer trade distorting FTAs maybe have a read at https://wikileaks.org/tpp/ and see just how much we're likely to be sold out by the Govt in their rush to do a deal.
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+1

"Market access" does not mean actual sales. For the US trade agreement, Australian producers will be competing with US producers in their own markets. I'm sure US consumers would be more likely to buy US produced product, just as Australians would be more likely to buy Australian products (if we could find them). And, as you rightly say if the US does an FTA with NZ or one of our other agricultural competitors, that dilutes our "share" of the US market.

FTA's with larger economies are dangerous to us, as the elephants have a lot of weight to throw around onto people like us.
 
Get ready for the Abbott infrastructure pork train

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...ig-project-rules/story-fn59niix-1227048290532

Assistant Infrastructure Minister Jamie Briggs has negotiated the changes with state treasurers and transport ministers in a bid to encourage more projects and to end rows over whether new *motorways and urban railways met Canberra’s cost-benefit benchmarks.

The new guidelines could clear the way for more construction by taking broader factors into *account — including community benefits — when states submit their plans to Infrastructure *Australia.

The Australian was told the new approach would make it easier for Canberra and the states to approve major projects such as the WestConnex in Sydney, the East West Link in Melbourne and the final stage of making the Pacific Highway dual-carriageway from NSW to Queensland.

Mammoth projects that are particularly expensive, such as road and rail tunnels, could emerge as the big winners because of the community gains from removing congestion.

Basically the Government is now saying if the investment doesn't stand up on economic grounds, we'll get someone who used to make traffic forecasts for toll roads and have them provide a figure on potential community benefits that allows the pork to flow.

If the infrastructure isn't self liquidating over time, that means taxes have to be higher or services lower to make up the shortfall. Those pork barrels ain't free ya know.

This flies totally in the face of recent report that the productivity commission has provided.

http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/inquiry/infrastructure/report/contents

It would seem the Abott Goverment has ripped out Chapter 2 of the report - Project Selection - and replaced it with Project Pork.
 

Wether you like it or not, it still has to be better than pink batts and sending out $900 scratchies.

Lets not forget, after that we were bringing in foriegn workers to fill in the shortfall.
 
sptrawler said:
Wether you like it or not, it still has to be better than pink batts and sending out $900 scratchies.

Lets not forget, after that we were bringing in foriegn workers to fill in the shortfall.
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Not sure how many got bats - mine are a Government friendly beige - but my household electricity bill was reduced something like 25% in summer and 35-40% in winter.

No argument from me that the programme was poorly managed, but I wont accept it being called a waste of funds. No way for us to actually find out, but I'm sure the electricity and gas retailers have the figures to show just how much energy consumption dropped due to the insulation.

Previous Govt programmes are not a valid reason for poor policy from the current Govt. possibly Abbott is resurrecting the Howard era regional rorts programme. Now that was A grade Liberal / marginal seat Pork. Even the Auditor General found the regional rorts to be on the exceptional side of poor policy.
 

Wether it was a waste of funds or not isn't the issue, it was the disregard for those who had put batts in at their own expense.

Then were taxed to put it in the roof of landlords and people who couldn't give a $hit about reducing their carbon footprint.

If you're going to use social or enviromental conscience, as an arguement, you have dropped a couple of rungs down the ladder.IMO

Gloating over taxpayer subsidised insulation, that you could obviously have afforded anyway, just makes you as big a rorter as anyone else.

I would much rather see Government funding going into road, rail infrastructure, than insulation in your roof.

Pretty shallow Syd.
 
It says everything about the power of the Pharmacy Guild that even such power as maintained by the big supermarkets has taken second place. About time someone stood up to the Pharmacy Guild.

sptrawler said:
Wether it was a waste of funds or not isn't the issue, it was the disregard for those who had put batts in at their own expense.
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It's no different from those of us who installed rooftop solar systems long before the current ubeaut subsidised system was offered. We continue to pay more for our electricity in order to subsidise those who adopted the government's generous system. So have the worst of both worlds, ie the considerable capital cost of installation and the ongoing increased electricity costs to pay for others.
Whacko! What a great deal. It is what it is.
 
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