Reports today that Australia’s ICT deficit is $21b (click here). It is a continual and persistent cause of a yearly report about how we should do something about our ICT deficit. Everyone remembers back in the 1950s when our ICT deficit was $0. Those were the days. None of these foreign-made computers all over the place.
The reports argue for a policy to redress these. Such as increased spending education and something about promoting ICT exports. But let’s face it, that won’t do the trick. We need to reset the clock to the 1950s and simply ban ICT goods. Indeed, as I look around education is a culprit not a cure (look at all those students using computers rather than paper). Then it will all be fine and we can be saved this yearly clutter in our newspapers.
By the way, while we are at it, we need to kill the clearly unsustainable trade surplus in wool but throttling exports there. We don’t owe the world a wool living!
Core Economics 
maybe we should tax the wool and mineral exporters to subsidize our poor ICT industry.
or better yet.. add a import tariff so our local PC manufacturers can compete. who wants sub 1000 PC’s anyway?
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Priceless Joshua.
A decade or so back US car manufacturers were saying the same thing about the predominantly one way trade in cars from Japan to the US. They wanted equality.
That was priceless too.
And yes, you were my deep throat about TelstraClear. Thanks.
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Joshua, the Australian Computer Society is generally regarded as a bunch of dicks and certainly doesn’t represent Australia’s IT industry.
They have only about 11,000 members out of a professional workforce of about 250,000. The president is a corporate lawyer and the previous president was a recruiter. Most of the executive body are various “consultants”, MBAs, accountants and so on, rather than high level software engineers or researchers.
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