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For the foreseeable future, that looks the only option...

"This is a self-sufficient country so let's take advantage of it"

But its not is it (2018 numbers) - cars, computers, oil, aircraft......................

#1 Machinery (AUD$46.2 billion)

Representing about 14% of Australian imports, machinery formed Australia’s largest import in 2018. The level of machinery imports has consistently been high, also representing $47.2 billion worth of Australia’s imports in 2016. This is not surprising given the investment in infrastructure and construction around Australia. Australians import everything ranging from computers and generators to centrifugal pumps, which are essentially ‘capital’ goods that help Australians make other goods.

#2 Oil (AUD$43.9 billion)

Mineral fuels represent around 13.3% of Australian imports, and this rapidly grew by around 33% from 2017 to 2018. Australia imports mainly all its oil and is on the path to becoming 100% reliant on imports for petroleum in 2030. Just over half of Australia’s imported refined petrol is imported from refineries in Singapore, followed by refineries in South Korea and Japan.

#3 Vehicles (AUD$43.6 billion)

Vehicles account for over 13% of Australia’s imports. In 2018, this included the importation of cars, trucks, automobile parts, tractors, trailers and more. Cars alone accounted for $24.3 billion in imports. The importation of specialised vehicles grew significantly. Imports of special purpose vehicles grew by up to 97% from 2017, whilst the imports of armoured vehicles and tanks escalated by over 16%.

#4 Electrical machinery and equipment (AUD$37.1 billion)

Australians love using electrical equipment – so it contributed around 11.3% of Australia’s imports in 2018. By far, the number one electrical piece of equipment forming the bulk of Australian imports were mobile phones, including smartphones. This alone accounted for about AUD$12.3 billion in Australian imports. The import of solar power products also increased significantly by 62% compared to 2017, as did electric generating sets and converters which increased by just over 52%.

#5 Medical/technical equipment (AUD$12 billion)

Optical, technical and medical equipment account for around 3.7% of Australian imports. This includes goods like electro-medical equipment such as x-rays and blood fractions.

#6 Pharmaceuticals (AUD$11.8 billion)

Pharmaceuticals account for about 3.6% of Australian imports. The importation of items such as medicines and medical devices is heavily regulated, and many pharmaceuticals are prohibited from entering into Australian borders by the Department of Health and Australian Border Force.

#7 Gems and precious metals (AUD$9.5 billion)

Representing around 2.9% of Australian imports, gems and precious stones are at #7 on the list. Australians love their jewellery and this plays a critically important role in international trade. Diamonds alone generated about AUD$624 million in value whilst jewellery altogether formed about AUD$1.4 billion in import value.

#8 Plastics and plastic articles ($AUD9.2 billion)

Plastic is a large international business, and it accounted for about 2.8% of Australian imports in 2018.

#9 Iron or steel articles (AUD$7.2 billion)

Coming in at number nine are iron and steel articles, accounting for around 2.2 per cent of Australian imports in 2018. This was a significant increase from the previous year.

#10 Furniture, bedding and lighting (AUD$6.9 billion)

Last but not least, Australians continue to invest in home furnishings, explaining why the importation of furniture, bedding and lighting accounted for 2.1% of all imports.

And if your entire fleet of 797's is leased out of Aruba? Is that counted as an import?
And if not, why not and what is it then if not an import?

https://www.lexology.com/library/det...5-4c91944cdf89

https://www.abf.gov.au/importing-exp...rting-aircraft

The internet is amazing.

Some lengthy reading in that lot but I'm not sure that it answers my question(s).

I understand about registration and payment of duty.
But I have not yet come across anything that clarifies or categorises subsequent leasing payments.

If you are going to send the value of an aircraft out of country every, say, five years for the life of the aircraft then does that fall into the "value of imports" basket or not?

Maybe I just need to read it all again.

She is very knowledgeable in her thinking & assessment of where we are unlike Queen P who is now telling us how qld is the place to holiday,shows again how out of touch she is.
Her fabulous holiday destinations will remain virtual ghost towns for a very long time due to her continual gloating in the media during the height of the pandemic,many people i have spoken to say they will never spend a $ in qld again & she hasnt got the message yet about the damage she has done.

apart from the resentment towards her and her utter buffoon deputy, I think the main issue for Qld and WA is the very very real possibility of yet another snap border closure. Same probably for Victoria. And this will endure until the vast majority of people have been vaccinated. At which point hopefully the respective premiers might take a more sensible approach to any new cases. And that won’t be until at least August or September.

Eventually, I probably will go back to QLD or WA for a holiday, but not for a very long time.:suspect:

You aren’t welcome in Queensland, Buster.

Queensland resorts are for Queenslanders.

Might be the only people in qld soon,1 new case in a brissy hospital,full lockdown coming???

Is now the time to slam the NSW border shut and start making panicky and juvenile statements about how appalling QLD systems are? That seems to be the way QLD has been working the last 12 months!

W.A.wetting themselves again. Where most of the world considers a 14 day incubation period adequate, these guys have decided on 28. My daughter was in MEL for a few hours between connecting flights two weeks ago. Apparently at about that time one case was traced to MEL airport, so anyone who spent any time there and arriving in PER since is now a suspect and must self isolate, depending on how long they were in transit. If no more cases, they will be let loose some time next week but they have been warned that if any more cases pop up from that source they will probably have to do another 14 days.
Meantime those of us who spent time with her have no restrictions. Where is the science behind this?

No. Looks like the infected doctor had limited community exposure.

Probably should look at stepping up the rollout to all 1A/1B workers ASAP, as it seems not all healthcare staff at that hospital who had contact with the patient had been in 1A (or had chosen to not take the vaccine). Latest change of plans is that the rollout end date of October is now apparently for the first AZ dose, second dose and full immunity to be done by December. At this stage.

Mach E Avelli. I fly to Melbourne and back to Perth twice each week. Last year I was in lockdown continuously for 3 months at home thanks to our idiot leader McClown and his WAPOL Nazis. Every 3 days my new WA entry started my 14 days over again. Never got COVID and I likely never will. Never doing self isolation again! Not using WA Safe or Vic Safe or any other Nazi tracking apps. I refuse to comply with any more of this madness. Our Nazi Governments can all get stuffed!

He is your elected leader, enjoy the next 4yrs of his rash decisions, the worst part is LNP will be wiped out so he will have free rain on anything unchallenged.

And the vaccine isn’t a race apparently? It sounds like they enjoy locking people down for one case.

At least WA seems to be doing well on the vaccine rollout.

LOL! You're right. I've already lived through the 80's so no need to see it again.

Well, it does appear that 'The Tribe Has Spoken'.......

As at 8:15PM WST., in the WA State Elections, Mark 'Shut The Gate' McGowan, has 46 seats....and the Libs have 2......

TOTAL Control...by the one party.

It seems we are happy here in WA.

WA people have voted its crazy how this pandemic makes people think. The real questions is, what did they even vote for? Do they even know why they voted for him? What has McGowen actually done other than close up shop at a sniff of COVID. His whole time in office is made on closing his border not dealing with the problem. I would go as far as even saying Queen P is better at this guy at dealing with the pandemic.

Let’s say Corona virus doesn’t exist, What has he done in his time?

"TOTAL Control...by the one party."
In reality total control by one person, who's first priority will be to gerrymander himself as emperor for life.

Thereafter let the corruption begin, lucky bugger is going to end up a very wealthy man.

The federal Liberal Party is corrupt to the core, maybe he is just taking leaf from their book.

Libs were never going to win but why wasnt scomo over there working his ass off trying to at least get some votes for his party instead of embarassing himself at a photo shoot with his 2 thumbs up salute looking like a complete d...head alongside all the other smiling assasains

Perhaps because he thought his Jobkeeper/Jobseeker handouts would help the Libs. In fact I suspect Labor benefited from them and had they not existed MeGowan might have had to act differently with his "lock downs".

I'd say WA probably had the least amount of businesses on the jobkeeper program.

It's amusing to read the rant from the east when it's patently obvious that you are all so intently focused on yourselves that you can't see anything other than "the West are idiots".

There is no doubt that Covid played a large part in the Labor win.
But that isn't what drove the size of the swing and certainly not the massive swing in the usually gold-label Liberal seats.

Ask yourselves, if you can, WHY ScoMo wouldn't touch this election with a barge pole.
Or WHY the usually far-right, steely-eyed, business leaders were running promotions for McGowan.

It certainly had nothing to do with restoring over-priced flights to your Meccas of the East.
And it had very little (I'd say nothing) to do with Covid or lock-downs.

I'll give you a bit of time to take off your shite-coloured glasses and see if you can work it out.
Hint! You won't find your answers on the Channel 9 breakfast show and not from down at the leagues club either.

I see there is a new case in NSW,it is a person who works in 2 quarantine hotels.
I didnt think working in 2 different workplaces was allowed if you were employed in hotel quarantine?
It will be interesting to see what this results in,if it was in vic all the ministers,dept heads etc would be hung out to dry already with comments such as Incompetent etc etc however i am not in any way defending how it was run here last year.
The nsw govt have done a great job but this case just shows that no matter how good a system is,its not foolproof.
Hopefully its contained really quickly & doesnt result in more lockdowns etc.

What did they vote for? Well I guess they didn’t vote for the WA Liberal party. A party which at the start of the pandemic wanted borders shut, then wanted borders open and aligned themselves with Clive Palmer, then a few months later wanted an even harder border with less exemptions for aircrew, then finally were happy with McGowan’s policy. Maybe showing a bit of consistency during a health crisis would be appreciated by the public.

I would think the very poor choice of leaders, Liza Harvey, a nobody, and Zak Kirkup the work experience kid harmed them too. Not to mention the party’s preselection disasters which led them to nominate candidates like 5G truthers and Trump supporting conspiracy nuts. It’s going to be tough for the party to recover in the state with no talent and they won’t even be the official opposition. Despite the usual “fought on state issues” talk the Federal Libs would be in fear I reckon.


Nope, good thing about Australia is our electoral boundaries are set by an independent Electoral Commission, as opposed to the US where politicians can gerrymander themselves to permanent wins.

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??

The predominant gerrymander in WA is the electorates for the upper house - tilted so heavily in favour of conservative parties that Labor has not had a majority in the upper house for 50 years or more.
But to change it, of course, you need a majority in the upper house.

So every Liberal-CP government for 50 years has had both houses and that is deemed to be perfectly OK, no problem at all.
But the prospect of a Labor government holding both houses is touted as being a disaster in the making, calamity will befall us, the sky is falling, the sky is falling.
What a bunch of hypocrits.

As for the lower house, while I am sure McGowan is felling very self-satisfied, smug even.
50 : 9 is not really much different than 30 : 29 - it's still just a simple majority.
And anything passed by the lower house still has to get past the "Farmers' House" across the other side of the corridor.

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.

I don’t know the answer, and I’ve had a think about it. But what I do know is that the traditional life long Liberal voters I spoke to who were all praising McGowan, were simply voting Labor this time because “he’s done a great job during COVID and kept us safe”. I didn’t hear a single reason other than that. These are small business owners, retirees and mostly high income earners. I would say that’s where the ~13% swing has come from.

McGowan revved up the parochialism perfectly during COVID, and doubled down recently with ad campaigns promising to keep FIFO jobs away from the filthy interstate people. Very clever politics, no doubt. Even more impressive and hilarious is that he’s from NSW :p

I'll give you three hints - Goiran, Collier & religious fanatacism.

The push against inter-state FiFo's is being driven by the mining companies. They much prefer FiFo's over mining towns full of families.
FiFo's are much easier to sack.
But they're much cheaper if you can just get them from Perth (or Busselton).

A320's, 168 seats, twice a week into YBLN these days.....

KA-CHING go the Council coffers....at last..!!

It’s all elementary. Now that McGowan has won the election, watch the hardline approach to border closures soften, as they did for PalaceChook and Gunner after they won their respective elections. If anyone thinks the measures were primarily based on health outcomes and not political ones, they’re kidding themselves.

Possibly, though currently being quoted as saying that "he will not hesitate to put the hard border back up", in reference to current Qld and NSW cases.

I'd have thought that there will be a softening anyway as target vaccination goals are achieved. October, maybe?

Delivered a budget surplus in 2019/2020 (ie pre-covid) and again in 2020/2021? That's generally seen as a pretty good thing. High employment. Hasn't spent time fighting pointless culture wars and defending alleged rapists - admittedly lately that's more a Federal Liberal thing, but it probably explains why Zac Kirkup hasn't seemed that keen for help from the Federal side lately, especially after the Feds briefly supported Clive Palmer's court challenges to force open the WA borders.

On the other hand, the local Liberals, having conceded the election a couple of weeks out, went to the polls arguing they should be supported locally with local candidates to prevent Labor having too much power, then put forward a bunch of religious nutters who have previously and publicly opposed gay marriage as being against god's wishes, and then refused to let those candidates answer questions when the media asked if they still held those views, among other counter-productive decisions.

If you want to get into really local issues, at my local polling booth yesterday, mid-morning, so with plenty of time still to vote, Labor and the Greens both had their volunteers handing out cards and talking to people. In contrast the Liberals had a pile of how-to-vote cards sitting on a table with a water bottle stopping them blowing away in the breeze, and no-one in sight. Even their own volunteers had given up!

It’s already happened. Only applying quarantine to those from NSW hotspots, not the entire state.

Counting hasn’t even finished in the election and the rhetoric has changed. You couldn’t make this shit up.

Yes, if this were two weeks ago hard border would of been raised over 1 case. ppl landing from NSW or QLD just being told they have to go into hotel gaol. McGowen is definitely a goose.