As Australian citizens, shopping for the cheapest bargain in stores, are we just selling our future to the Chinese?
Today many of the Industries that employed the workers of Australia have disappeared. This has come about by us deciding to buy those items that were once made in Australia, from China now. This act of price point shopping has brought many Australian businesses to their knees.
Growing up I would drive-thru the industrial areas with my dad. These areas were thriving with businesses making products that was sold in Australia and overseas. Those sales kept Australian dollars in our our country and bought foreign currency into our banks. Today when I pass through those same areas, I see they are full of shops to sell foreign goods, warehouses to store goods bought in from China or even the commercial areas are totally gone and housing units have taken their place.
I seriously wonder, as I cast my eyes over these formerly thriving industrial zones, what the hell is it that we are left making in Australia? With this question comes a deep seated concern for future generations and what work will be left for them to do.
Quite honestly if Australians thought about it in a very real way, they might consider that each family, through it’s foreign purchases, is probably sending over $10,000 to these foreign lands each year. This is money that was formerly going into our own country, now that money is going to help China grow into a superpower, into a financial juggernaut, into a very rich and posperous country. At the same time Australians are struggling to find work, are being told how much further we are sinking into debt personally and as a nation, how we need to tighten our belts because the lucky country is not the lucky country anymore.
How can we, as smart people, just let this continue on, day after day? How can we not be thinking about our cheap foreign purchases maybe causing the bankruptcy of the lucky country ? How can we not be thinking about the future of our children and our grand children?
Yes buying cheap is a short term joy for us to be able to buy more ” things”. But quite honestly it seems to me, as a person who loves my country, that those cheap purchases, are selling our future down the drain. By sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to foreign lands, we are bankrupting ourselves, doing ourselves out of work, further pushing ourselves and our great nation into debt.
Will the ultimate insult come one day, when we, formerly of the lucky country, wake up and find out, we are so broke that we now rank as a third world country.
Please think about these words.