The main issue that I see is; our govt has cowtowed to foreign countries and dropped all import tariffs to achieve a 'level playing field' This is called "politicians sucking up to other countries to try and set themselves up for an ambassadorship" (see Tony Abbot)
The problem with that is....we are the only ones on that playing field
No other country has no import tariffs
Fifty years ago, Australia had a very strong manufacturing base, and if we had closed the doors to Australia, we would have survived quite easily.
Unfortunately we voted the Labor Party into power and it has a been a downhill slide since then
The Labor Party is based in communism and is controlled by the Fabien Society which has as its doctrine that ALL people should be dependent on the government for their survival. the only way to do this is to put everyone on the dole/pension and then you have the ideal communist state.
Have a look at the economic history of the major western countries. Every time labor is in power, the economy is run down into deficit. It then takes a a liberal or conservative govt to pull it out of the poo. The only time labor is any good is in wartime, they can marshal the workforce
My response to all this is....stop selling our raw materials to overseas and value add to them here thus increasing our manufacturing base and making us a strong nation again
Countries such as China and Japan have only grown rich because we were stupid enough to sell our raw materials to them. They processed the raw material and sold the finished product back to us at highly inflated prices
End of rant......