Originally Posted by
neville_nobody
It is not like that at all. The East Coast realise they are part of a whole nation and we all rely on each other to keep the country working. Ultimately State Borders are only administrative however in WA it seems they believe it's a border to another country.
Anyway the party is going to end pretty quickly in WA when they run out of workers to actually do anything from cooking a steak, to engineering a road or a building. Always has been a Boom/Bust economy that has relied on staff from overseas and interstate. If it's too hard to actually get there and work then noone is going to do it. McGowan has painted himself into a policy corner. Do you either change your border policy that got you elected and look like a hypocrite or do you keep your border policy and blowup your economy??
Any jurisdiction that relies heavily on resources is always going to be at the mercy of the international resources markets and global fluctuation in trade. But what we're talking about there resembles Australia as a whole as much as it resembles just WA.
If you don't have a manufacturing sector to speak off then that's always going to happen.
In my lifetime I can not remember a downturn in the WA economy that was not associated with an equivalent downturn in the Australian economy and, more generally, a downturn in the western world economies.
As for availability of labour, you can hardly blame McGowan because ScoMo has the international borders closed.
And I think your assessment of our reliance on inter-state labour is grossly inflated.
And finally, I'm left wondering how many trips Cuddly Clive has made to WA since the border has been open.
Maybe he didn't really need to come at all.
I see that no one has taken a stab at my question in Link 3959 yet.