by Graphite
On the factory floor
As a young bloke in the mid 1980s, I worked in a string of factories.
Manufacturing cosmetics. Food processing. Light engineering. Nothing glamorous. But it was steady work, and there was plenty of it. If you were prepared to turn up on time, follow instructions and pull your weight, you could get a job within a week. Often, on the same day you started looking.
Manufacturing was already under pressure. Tariff walls were thinning. Imports were rising. Yet Australia still made things. We processed our own food. We built components. We ran metal through presses and learned what automation meant, not in theory but in practice.
Those jobs mattered. They were relatively well paid. They imposed discipline. They trained a generation of Australians to think about machines, production lines and process improvement. They gave working people a stake in the technological frontier.
In 2026, that world has almost vanished. Manufacturing employment is a fraction of what it was. Young Australians who want to learn how production systems actually work are more likely to be told to code an app than to optimise a robotic arm.
That’s a loss. Not just economically, but culturally and strategically.
Tariffs are back in the headlines
With Trump tariffs once again dominating international news coverage, it’s timely to revisit the question of tariffs in Australia.
For two generations now, tariffs were treated as relics of a primitive economic past. The consensus was clear. Open markets. Free trade. Comparative advantage. Specialise in what you’re ‘naturally’ good at and let the rest be made elsewhere.
Yet major economies now use tariffs, industrial policy and strategic procurement without apology. The United States does it. The European Union does it. China certainly does it.
The question is not whether tariffs exist. The question is how they are used, and to what end.
The Australian Settlement
Australians once thought deeply about these issues.
Historian Paul Kelly described the policy framework that emerged around Federation as the ‘Australian Settlement’. It rested on protection, arbitration, a White Australia policy, and state paternalism. The protection element was central. Tariff walls supported domestic industry. In turn, those industries supported a growing urban working and middle class.
The result was not perfect. It was sometimes inefficient. But it built steelworks, car plants and food processing giants. It anchored communities. It fostered skills. It created a sense that Australia could make things, not just dig them up.
Protection was not a dogma. It was a tool.
The neoliberal turn
Tariffs began to fall in the 1970s. The Whitlam Government made the first decisive cuts. Successive Liberal and Labor governments continued the trend through the 1980s and 1990s.
The rationale was rooted in neoliberal orthodoxy. Trade without restriction. Focus on natural advantage. Compete globally.
To some extent, the argument was sound. It would be absurd for Norway to grow bananas in heated greenhouses if it can trade North Sea fish for tropical produce. Trade based on genuine climatic or geological difference is rational.
But the concept of “natural advantage” was quickly stretched. Access to very cheap labour became a ‘natural advantage’. Minimal environmental regulation became a natural advantage. Weak workplace safety became a natural advantage.
In effect, the theory of comparative advantage morphed into a licence to externalise social and environmental costs.
There was local resistance. Australia Uprooted, Australia Ripped Off and Australia on the Rack, were produced in the late 1970s by the Metal Workers’ Union’s research and education arm. They were closely associated with the union’s leadership under Laurie Carmichael and with its industrial research staff, including figures such as Ted Wilshire.
While not academic monographs in the formal sense, they were substantial agitational documents, combining data, political economy and industrial argument to contest the emerging free-trade orthodoxy and to defend an interventionist national industry policy.
In 1987 the ACTU and the Trade Development Council, or TDC, released Australia Reconstructed. The TDC was a tripartite body established in the Hawke era, bringing together unions, industry and government around questions of trade and industry policy. It sat within the broader Accord framework and was intended to give institutional shape to industry restructuring. Australia Reconstructed was a substantial industry policy document that attempted to chart a path between crude protectionism and blind deregulation. It argued for sectoral strategies, skills upgrading, technology transfer, export development and cooperative planning between unions, government and business. It did not deny the pressures of global competition; it sought to meet them throug restructuring, productivity and investment rather than surrender.
The intellectual and political ferment that produced Australia Reconstructed in the 1980s, documented in detail by Evan Jones and others, shows that even at the height of liberalisation there was a serious conversation inside the labour movement about how to modernise industry rather than simply abandon it. Sadly, none of it gained any traction.
Offshoring and Australia’s de-industrialisation
The 1990s saw large-scale offshoring. Manufacturing migrated to jurisdictions with lower wages and looser standards. Australian factories closed. Skills were lost.
As described earlier, there was resistance. Trade unions initially defended tariffs in a traditional sense. Over time, a more nuanced position developed. Where trade reflected genuine differences in resource endowment or climate, it need not be impeded. But where the ‘advantage’ derived from exploited labour or environmental degradation, the cost was not natural at all. It was simply shifted onto someone else.
The logical response was to recover those ‘externalised’ costs at the border.
That idea took form in what became known as the Social Tariff, or in the language of students at the University of Technology Sydney, the Boomerang Tariff.
Doug Cameron and the Boomerang Tariff
Around 1999 and 2000, Doug Cameron, then President of the AMWU, articulated the concept of a social tariff. The proposition was simple. If goods are produced under conditions that would be unlawful or unacceptable in Australia, a tariff should apply when those goods enter our market. The tariff would reflect the social and environmental costs avoided in production.
At the UTS, White and others later developed the Boomerang Tariff idea in more formal academic terms. The tariff would ‘boomerang’ back the externalised costs into the price of the imported product. It would not punish legitimate trade. It would level the field.
This was not about complete autarky. It was a demand for reciprocity. It was a reasonable step towards fairer trade.
Re-examining the Social Tariff in 2026
In 2026, the social tariff deserves a fresh look.
First, it aligns with an older Australian labour nationalism. The labour tradition was not anti-trade. It was pro-nation. It sought to ensure that global engagement did not hollow out domestic capacity or undercut living standards.
Second, it can be framed in modern terms. A social tariff today would not aim to preserve outdated production lines. It would aim to protect and seed high-technology, automated, value-adding industries.
Cheap labour abroad has two corrosive effects. It exploits workers in the exporting country. It also acts as a handbrake on innovation in the importing country. As Mark Krikorian has observed in another context, an abundant supply of low-wage labour reduces the incentive to invest in productivity-enhancing technology. If you can hire ten workers cheaply, why build the robot?
A social tariff changes that formula. By neutralising the wage arbitrage, it nudges capital towards automation, robotics and AI. It makes investment in advanced manufacturing rational again.
There are, of course, challenges.
WTO compliance. Any tariff regime must be defensible under international trade rules. The answer lies in careful design. Tariffs linked to measurable labour and environmental standards, applied transparently and non-discriminatorily, can be structured to meet existing exceptions for public morals and environmental protection.
Measurement. How do you calculate the externalised cost? Modern data systems make this more feasible than in 2000. Supply chain transparency and digital certification are advancing rapidly. Australia already operates complex biosecurity and product compliance systems. A social tariff would sit alongside them.
Retaliation. Some trading partners may object. Yet many advanced economies are already exploring carbon border adjustments and due diligence requirements. Australia would not be alone.
Consumer prices. Yes, some goods would cost more. But the alternative is a continued erosion of domestic capability, stagnant wages and strategic dependence. The question is not price alone. It is national resilience and long-term prosperity.
Revenue from a social tariff could be hypothecated. It could fund advanced manufacturing precincts, worker-owned cooperatives, robotics research and skills training. It could support regional communities transitioning from raw commodity export to value-added processing.
This is not nostalgia. It’s strategic adaptation.
A glimpse of 2086
Imagine regional Australia in 2086.
The wheat still grows. The cattle still graze. The orchards still bear fruit. But scattered among them are compact, highly automated processing facilities. Worker-owned. AI-managed. Robotics handling the heavy lifting. Small teams of technicians overseeing systems that add extraordinary value to primary production.
Australian-designed machinery exports itself to the world. Energy is reliable and among the cheapest in the world, courtesy of state investment in nuclear generation. Productivity is high. Wages are high. The middle class is broad.
Ask how it began.
In this imagined history, the turning point came in 2024 with the introduction of a carefully designed Social Tariff. It levelled the field. It generated seed capital. It signalled that Australia would not compete on exploited labour or degraded environments. We would compete on skill, technology and organization.
That decision triggered a manufacturing renaissance. Not a return to the past, but a leap forward.
The Social Tariff is not a silver bullet. It is a policy instrument. Like the tariff component of the old Australian Settlement, it can be misused or overextended. But it can also be deployed with discipline and purpose.
In the mid-1980s, a very average, working-class teenager could walk into a factory and find work. In 2086, perhaps a teenager will walk into a robotics plant in regional Australia and find something better. Skilled work. Shared ownership. A stake in the nation’s productive future.
For Australian nationalists, that possibility is worth serious thought.