I don't agree. Lowering tariffs and handing over our manufacturing capability was one of the biggest betrayals of the people of the countries of the West by their governing elites. They wanted to destroy the higher wages and conditions of the middle/working classes vis a vis the slave wages and conditions of the third world. So they traded off our manufacturing capabilities in exchange for access to the huge Chinese (etc) markets for our services/finance/mining, farming products (remember Hawke telling us we were going to be the clever country), which made some very wealthy Australians even wealthier at the expense of the working/middle class, plus they got cheap slave wage products in return and laid the foundations for transforming our jobs market into a gig economy with progressively declining wages and work conditions.
Trouble is, they didn't count on how disastrous that would be for the West's economic, technical and, most importantly, military superiority, and now the Trump faction is determined to reintroduce tariffs to again grow America's manufacturing base before China gets so far ahead it will be too late.
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