The best country in the world, page-51

"The unions could actually play a part and be realistic about manufacturing conditions and wages etc, but they are too stupid and would rather just militant."

So please explain the success of countries such as Sweden or Norway with less than half the population of Australia. They have thriving manufacturing industries exporting premium products all around the world, a unionised workforce, high proportion of welfare, some of the finest education and medical institutions. All with a strong unionised workforce. Nah the answer is we have had crap governments (mainly LNP) that would rather we be just a quarry exporting cheap ore until it runs out. The only decent industries we have in australia are CSL and Cochlear. Both world class. We give $400 million to a unknown Barrier Reef company that employs maybe a handfull of people when we could have provided seed capital to build premium products. A have bolded premium because the normal way is to take that money and build low cost, low quality in a futile attempt to compete with asian products.