The Productivity Commission again says de-regulate the sugar industry which is just more economic sabotage for farmers. Huge trans-national Corporations continue to strip the nation of its non-renewable natural resources. Donald Trump is leading the charge in the US to halt his country’s economic haemorrhage. The ALP and LNP’s only plan for this country is to open the gaping wound. This week’s symbolic alteration to work visa laws will not make more jobs for Australians.
KAP Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter has asserted the Productivity Commission (PC) is a cancer upon the economic soul of Australia.
The Productivity Commission has advocated a return to the deregulation in the sugar industry and an abolition of KAP’s statutory marketing legislation.
Peter Harris is Chairman of the Productivity Commission. Mr Harris has previously served as Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and the Victorian Government agencies responsible for Sustainability and the Environment; Primary Industries; and Public Transport.
He has worked for the Ansett-Air New Zealand aviation group and as a consultant on transport policy. He has also worked in Canada on exchange with the Privy Council Office (1993-1994). His career with the government started in 1976 with the Department of Overseas Trade and included periods with the Treasury; Finance; the Prime Minister’s Department and Transport; and he worked for two years in the Prime Minister’s Office on secondment from the Prime Minister’s Department as a member of then Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s personal staff.
If his sterling career that earned him an AO is examined, one will find most positions he has held have encapsulated monumental disasters. For example Ansett, Sustainability and Environment, Overseas Trade, Bob Hawke’s personal staff, ad nauseam. This man’s antecedents should have sent him to jail not given him an award.
This Adam Smith-inspired, laissez faire Canberra bureaucracy has proven an abomination to Australian manufacturing and primary industries. This hideous, Marxist ideology shines as the epitome of the Liberal and Labor parties, leaving unregulated markets to the whim of the rapacious trans-national economies.
This man has steered the country into economic oblivion.
“The Productivity Commission has their sympathisers in the Liberal Party and the ALP ‘puppets on an AWU string’. And of course the AWU needing site coverage are ‘puppets on the Wilmar string’. In any event the ALP and LNP are the political wing of the Productivity Commission, PC and they are a cancer on the economic soul of Australia”, Mr Katter said.
“The Productivity Commission, whatever it was called at the time advocated the deregulation of the wool industry in 1990.
“In 1990 wool was bigger than coal. But the PC’s deregulation destroyed the wool industry, 73% of our sheep are gone. The price is shattered. Wool is now $2000m a year. Wool prices have improved but should be worth over $20B/a year.
“Next the motor vehicle industry. 84% of our Motor Vehicles were Australian Made in 1987. Following the PC recommendation the industry collapsed. Next year there will be none. Over $20,000m, once going to Australians, will now be going overseas.
“Now today their decision on ethanol. They have advised the Government that Australia would be better off sending $26B to the Middle East to buy oil instead of sending that $20B of this into rural Australia to buy “clean” ethanol.
“This is $60B a year in just 3 items, $50,000 per year/per family – lost, gone.
“We import all of our “whitegoods” from overseas. All of our “metal processing” in Australia is ceasing since the privatisation and deregulation of the electricity market has driven prices up 300%. They knew this would happen. It’s exactly what happened in California.
“So Mount Isa Mines has announced the closure of much of its copper processing. The nickel plant in Townsville has closed. Kagara Zinc has closed.
“The PC’s deregulation recommendation of dairy, eggs and sugar – but the price “down” to the farmers by nearly 30%. Whilst prices to the consumers rose 25%. Piggy in the middle got an extra $2B a year.
“What an appalling record.”
Mr Katter moved at the last sittings for a Parliamentary Inquiry with a view to replacing the Productivity Commission with a body based outside of Canberra, and consisting of people with ‘hands-on’ experience in production and commerce.