Companies going into administration 12% higher than during GFC!

[302 XC]

Originally Posted by Auslandau

I own and operate an Australian family owned business and produce products that are Australian made and of high quality which I am extremely proud of. I compete against Bunnings and Masters and if my product is $5200.00 and they are $5,000 for a lower quality 100% imported from China product that is guaranteed to fall apart in a couple of years ..... people still choose to buy the product that is $200.00 cheaper. Happens all the time and very frustrating.

So what do you do? Drop your Australian made higher quality product to below the cheap crap? I can honestly say ...... the absolute majority do not care where things come from. All you get all day is "Can you match Bunnings or Masters?" Would love to say .... "If I take a hammer to mine and cheapen the crap out of it, sack a few people and import it all from China, I can!" People do not care .....

Totally agree, its all on the ticket price, nothing else matters,sad as it is
But what gets up my nose,people jump up and down about "Buy aussie made",yet drive their import,watch their import tellie,sitting on their import lounge,heating dinner in their import microwave,you get the picture

[pottery beige]

bloody aussie way mate.. what i would give for a cheap set of imported jousting sticks..

[chamb0]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

Farmers complaining about prime farm land being taken over by governments for national parks in some sort of race to try and have "the biggest" national park area "in the world!!!!" as if it's some sort of international competition? Get the government to stop making more and more areas locked up by national parks then...we need farm land more than we need a locked up area with some trees that no one ever goes to see.

It’s nobody else’s fault but yours that you don’t visit our national parks. They’re not locked up - millions of other aussies and international tourists enjoy them, and are better off for doing so – urban planners etc. recognise that national and state parks have a measurable and significant positive impact on the health and wellbeing of nearby people.


However if you’re more comfortable thinking in just economic terms, they underpin our tourism industry which contributes hugely to the economy. Australia has a unique landscape and ecology like nowhere else in the world which makes it a highly desirable destination. Our national parks help support the regional and local economies they are situated in. As an example, I worked in a national park in an area heavily impacted by the 2009 fires, and getting the park back up and running and open for visitors was a critical factor in helping the nearby towns on their feet again. And this park is only a small player in the scheme of things.


You consistently take every opportunity you can on here to have a spiteful swipe at anything pro-environmental. I think your pitching of the issue as a ‘farms vs. national parks’ contest is an overly simplistic one. Like most other things we really need a healthy balance of both. Economists tell us that the natural environment is a fundamental support base for an economy, providing it with goods and services, and if you degrade or incompetently mismanage it you are setting yourself up for failure in the long term. There’s nothing airy fairy about that, it’s just the way the system works.


As one example have a look at the mess we’ve created in Australia with poorly managed land clearing – check out the massive economic impact of dryland salinity, the deterioration of the Murray-Darling basin (one of our most important food-producing regions), and the cost incurred by damaged ecosystems which can no longer provide the provisioning and supporting services required by agriculture (soil, clean water, insect pollination, nutrient cycling etc etc.). Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t clear land for farms, but it does mean we have to be really smart about how we go about it. Agriculture in Australia is largely at the mercy of marginal ancient shallow soils, scarce water and an unpredictable climate, which is the hard lesson we’ve been learning ever since Europeans arrived here trying to use the same old farming methods brought from back in old blighty. If you’re concerned by our ability to produce food, it only makes sense that you’re concerned about these things as well.


Australia doesn’t have an abundance of prime agricultural land, and what we do have was either cleared and utilised very early on (sometimes permanently degraded in the case of salinity) or unfortunately is swallowed up by urban development. Melbourne’s urban sprawl is a sad example of the latter. Maybe we should get smarter at the way we plan our cities?


In some ways more than a few of our national and state parks are a bit like army training areas… given the scraps left over that are little use for any other purpose.

[302 XC]

Over 90 % of brisbanes northside prime growing land has been turned into housing estates,within the last 20 years
What wasn't prime growing land was grazing land,most of that went before then to perhaps throw down roads for the housing estates ,or the highways we drive
Whats left of anything decent is now worth more than the graziers or farmers will ever make in their life
Some of the land even small parcels is worth millions ,interest alone on that money many farmers are struggling to make a year .....
Maybe we should plan the cities, but who wants to travel for things or move where theres no public transport ,or hospitals are a distant ???
90% of people wont live without conveniences, there are those,like myself who hate the rat race ,but to enjoy the peace of land space,i loose on other things,it takes 1 1/2 hour to go to a decent shopping centre,yep 3 hours travel round trip to go shopping
People want the cake and eat it to, just doesn't happen