I'm afraid you've hit the nail squarely on the head inyour first paragraph, pug munter. If it aint on the sporting pages, the average Ozmate ignores it.
Have any of these high flyers not studied history? Surely the high powered MBA courses they all seem to require to reach the upper echelons of big business still cover the fact that when Henry Ford came up with the novel idea of paying is workers a half way decent wage, he created a very large new market for his products. His own workers, with money to spend, started buying the very goods they were producing.
Australia's business and political leaders (is there any difference?) all seem hell bent on destroying that market and putting as many local people out of work as possible - at least until they are willing to work for coolie wages and under coolie conditions.
Most younger people in Australia (and many outside Australia) know about the much maligned "White Australia Policy" of the late 19th and first half of the last century. I'd be willing to bet that very few who "know" about the WAP don't realise that, (while its racial aspect can never be denied), the main reason it enjoyed so much support among ordinary people of the time was becuse it protected their working conditions and prevented employers bringing in coolie labour.
I don't need an MBA to tell me that Australian workers living what I would like to think of as an average Australian lifestyle will never be able to compete with Bangla Deshi workers "enjoying" the lifestyle of surburban Dhaka - or Chinese producing products from a Chinese prison workshop.
Forget the 'lifestyle' argument - take a look at the lack of rules (or at least the failure to adhere to rules) in Chinese factories in the area of pollution control and worker safety. (The appaling safety record of Chinese coal mines come immediately to mind.)
I'm sorry if the use of the word 'coolie' upsets readers who are more PC that I am, but, perhaps because of the very un-PC overtones of that word, it is exactly the right word to use to describe where we're heading.