I continue to believe Australia should ensure a significant percentage of all possible food goods are produced solely domestically. I have concerns about the loss of manufacturing competency, about the lack of onshore petroleum processing and a strategic fuel reserve, and the lack of legislated supply from Australian natural resources. We were within weeks of being unable to drive diesel engines because of a dependency on urea fuel additive, not produced onshore.
I have no problem with trade in general, and don't see the point of tariff barriers when you can just use legislation to require shops to offer Australian produce, and require companies to supply to Australia without exposing it to international price variances which don't relate to cost of production.
I'm not arguing for autarky. I'm arguing for strategic resiliency and a viable domestic farming and production capacity.
Not having fruit canning onshore, and driving dairy farming out of viability feels like suicide. Biosecurity is a real concern: we have had repeated outbreaks of white spot disease from imported prawns, and it's almost impossible to buy Australian caught prawns which haven't been through Vietnam or Thai processing chains. That's a very long line cost to package prawn meat, and the infection came in along that supply chain. We import pineapples and bananas. That's insane!
Manufacturing is hard. Holden(GM) and Ford shut down when we stopped price support. How the fuck are we meant to make bombs and trucks and UAV at scale if we don't have the manufacturing capacity? We JV with rhinemetal and do stuff onshore but I worry it's another long line dependency. We have Boeing ICT and aircraft logistics people onshore, we should have more. We should have AUKUS manufacturing significant inputs to the subs onshore.
I hate that this reads like a pro Trump diatribe. The guy is a prick. Tariffs aren't the answer, some sense of security driven strategic trade alignment is the issue.