practice | MANAGEMENT
Huge financial changes to impact dentists By Graham Middleton
“Dentists with long memories will remember Paul Keating’s self-styled ‘Recession we had to have’... Manufacturing jobs vanished as non-competitive industries closed in Australia and were rebirthed in China...”
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entists with long memories will remember then-Labor Treasurer Paul Keating’s self-styled “Recession we had to have” of the early 1990’s. It was designed by Treasury and Reserve bank officials to crush high inflation. It accompanied a restructuring of the Australian economy through floating our dollar and deregulatory measures. A host of formerly protected businesses were crushed as Australia converted from a significant manufacturing economy to a service economy. In retrospect, Treasury officials admitted that they had not realised the seriousness of the recession in their cosseted world of Canberra, with its high household income and multitudes of job protected government employees. I remember a client, an engineer, whose last task for his employer was to photograph, number and pack the manufacturing plant into containers to be shipped to China. He subsequently carried out similar tasks for another business specialising in packing up manufacturing plants and freighting them to China! Manufacturing jobs vanished as non-competitive industries closed in Australia and were rebirthed in China.
76 Australasian Dental Practice
Not all bad conomics teaches us that the world is better off when every country concentrates on producing the goods and services where it has a natural advantage. Australia’s natural advantages have long been in mining and agriculture, but technology has displaced many of the jobs in those sectors. Modern miners use huge machines which have long since displaced large numbers of humans toiling with picks and shovels while agriculture has seen huge aggregations of farms. As such, Australia had to develop jobs in service industries including tourism and education. Many students studied in Australia for the purpose of gaining residency. Tourism benefitted from having alternate seasons to the Northern Hemisphere. Both were successful until COVID shut Australia off from the world.
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Is there a coming recession? ach major financial event starts differently but there is always an impact. The Keating recession had the deepest and longest impact of any economic event since the Great Depression of the 1930s which preceded World War 2.
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May/June 2022
