Rose-coloured view of homegrown manufacturing

Robert Findley is living in a dream world (Bring manufacturing back to Australia, CCN 382).

There never was a time when “we had a wonderful self-reliant country”: that is just a nostalgic, rose-coloured view of a past that never existed.

What we did have was inefficient industries producing inferior goods at above-market prices, behind protective tariff walls that guaranteed business profits but left the whole of society economically worse off.

I can remember how we used to pore over the pages of international magazines and wonder at the range of goods that we had no access to.

By contrast, what we have now is affordable access to the cheapest and most technologically advanced products in the world, thanks to the far-sightedness of Gough Whitlam and others who dragged