If there’s one positive thing that has come out of Coronavirus, it’s the shift towards buying food, clothing and whatever else that has been made here in Australia. From Australian products, produced on-shore by Australian-owned companies. This is a good thing.
For too long now, Australian companies have been either selling out to overseas investors or moving their operations to an off-shore location (often China or another Asian country) where they can get the work done far more cheaply, at the cost of their Australian workforce. Then they bring their products back into Australia but the price doesn’t come down so they are making huge profits. The items, especially clothing, are not as well made, yet customers are still paying top dollar for the label. But the ongoing selling of so many of our best assets to overseas interests is a national disgrace and the sales of large rural beef and dairy properties and our ports to foreign buyers is criminal.
Then there’s the companies labelling their products made in Australia, but from a high content of imported ingredients (visible only if you red the very tiny print on the back of the packaging). A lot of Australians have fumed over this. They have been angered by the string of Australian-owned businesses, farms and other valuable assets that have had the green light to sell out to a foreign owner and it has become harder to find Australian-owned food and other products that are still produced and packaged here. It’s not beneficial for a country to be too dependent on another and even less so when the other country is allowed to buy up to much local real estate and so many local businesses. It’s just not good.
Like many others, I have often wondered why. Well yes, some people are just all about the money which tosses national pride out the window, but when you think about it, Australia can grow it’s own crops, it’s own beef, lamb, pork and poultry, even allowing for the impact on some industries due to drought. We produce some of the finest wool in the world, grow cotton, fruit and vegetables, so if you add all of that up it becomes obvious that we could easily sustain ourselves, just like Australia did decades ago. Certainly, trade is useful and often necessary, but it should not be used to supply the bulk of our needs when we can so easily do this ourselves.
And then came COVID-19 and everyone started to wake up to what a lot of us had already been thinking. Keep it local. Locally sourced, locally produced, locally made. Locally owned. This is what makes a country wealthy and sustainable in a situation like the one we are in now. It’s what keeps a nation’s citizens in employment and keeps the national debt to a minimum and stops the nation’s primary producers from going under, even in the event of drought or flood or other natural disaster. It’s what keeps a nation going in situation like this one.
So if every cloud has a silver lining, this could be ours, because the push to reject overseas imports for Australian owned, grown and produced products is not a bad thing. This should be our first line of supply and these products should be placed prominently on our supermarket shelves, on the racks in clothing stores and wherever else goods are sold. It should also apply to major industries too. Use Australian produced building products. If the Australian Government wants the country to survive the Coronavirus then it needs to put Australian businesses and their products first and promote them on a large scale. This will boost our economy because the money we spend on these products will stay here in Australia, not end up in the coffers of an overseas company.
It’s not difficult to do.