The government will not adopt a “Buy Australian” policy of giving preference to local firms when allocating multibillion dollar contracts because that would repeat the mistakes of the Great Depression, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said yesterday.
Manufacturing union delegates are expected to seek a policy change aimed at saving jobs in the global recession when they attend the ruling Labor Party’s annual national conference in Sydney this week.
Rudd said Australia’s wealth depended on its access to export markets, which would be compromised by protectionism.
“We need to avoid any form of protectionist measure, which invites retaliatory protectionist measures from economies around the world, and that’s what would happen,” Rudd told reporters.
“The mistake of the Great Depression in the early 1930s was this: Economies believed that the way to get themselves through was to shut their economies down and close their borders to imports from abroad,” he said. “The entire global economy shrinks.”
“That depression resulted in negligible economic growth throughout the 1930s. We’re not about to repeat those mistakes here,” he said.
Rudd has condemned similar protectionist policies in other countries as damaging to Australian exports and to international trade.
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Dave Oliver said a public survey commissioned by his union had found that most Australians want the government to adopt a “Buy Australian” policy to bolster employment.
He blamed a lack of government action for the loss of 76,000 manufacturing jobs in the past year.
“It’s no different to what governments around the world have been doing for many years,” he said.
Jeff Lawrence, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said he expected the unions and the government to reach a compromise on how contracts are allocated.
“Our fundamental position is that if the government is spending ... public money, as it clearly has through the stimulus package, that should be on the basis of conditions,” Lawrence told Nine Network television.
“I’m very hopeful that in the next week, there’ll be a measure of agreement between unions and the government about means by which the government spends its money,” he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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