From down under:
“Everything we were force-fed about the benefits of free trade, by governments from Hawke and Keating on, was garbage,” he charged.
“All it has done is send the world—including China—bankrupt, so now each nation’s government must take the necessary measures to get their economies producing for their people’s needs.
“We must learn from history: in World War II John Curtin and Ben Chifley transformed our economy in a few years from a grazing/mining backwater into a modern manufacturing powerhouse.
“As Trade Minister from 1949-1970, the great Country Party leader John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen consolidated that transformation through comprehensive protectionist measures.
“Since then, the wankademic economists and political leaders babbled from the same script about ‘inefficient industries’ and ‘consumer costs’ to justify slashing tariffs, and look where it’s got us—an unpayable $1 trillion foreign debt, a household debt to annual income ratio of 175 per cent—one of the highest in the world, a dangerous vulnerability in our dependence upon China to buy our resources and manufacture our consumer goods (neither of which it is reliable for anymore), and an economic breakdown crisis worse than the 1930s Depression. “
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0903/S00005.htm