Making Australia Great Again
One subsidy at a time.
The title of this post is a play on MAGA – Make America Great Again – which is basically a blanket term for former President Trump's protectionist policies. Those policies are founded on the belief that the loss of manufacturing jobs in America was a deliberate choice, rather than the natural outcome of an evolving economy. Many of those policies have been broadened by the Biden administration, and if Trump wins a second term he'll almost certainly double-down on them.
But America never lost its greatness. It's still the world's largest economy, is the wealthiest country after various oil-rich states, entrepots and corporate tax havens, is the second-largest manufacturing nation in the world by output, has the largest military spending by a long way, and has bounced back better than most from the pandemic:
That's not to say that America doesn't have its share of problems; just that losing manufacturing or its 'greatness' isn't one of them.
I actually think Australia is still pretty great, too. We rank highly on various global indicators, including first for equity and healthcare outcomes, third for overall healthcare, twelfth in terms of GDP per capita, and fourteenth in the ease of doing business. The OECD's Better Life Index – which scores various measures of well-being across countries – ranks us second overall (the methodology is still being fine-tuned and currently gives an equal weighting to each measure):
We regularly punch above our weight on the world stage, so much so that the world keeps talking about our 4th overall finish on the Olympic medal tally, despite ranking 55th in population Raygun.
But that hasn't stopped many Aussies, led by PM Anthony Albanese (Albo), from jumping on the MAGA bandwagon. The loss of Australian manufacturing was such as big blow that they want to impose some variation of Trump- and Biden-style industrial policy down under to 'restore' its share of output to an arbitrary point in history. Those policies have been lumped together and tabled to Parliament as the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, which looks set to be passed in September.
We've never had it so good
I've written a lot about why a Future Made in Australia is a terrible waste of resources, but a recent article in the ABC about the forthcoming Bill got so much wrong that I thought an update was warranted.