The fallacy involved in pretending that government's giving cheap licences to private companies to take natural resources are not public subsidies to those companies

Governments subsidise (i.e.gift public resources) to private owners of companies by giving companies free licences (as they do with banks)or cheap licences & low taxes, for taking public resources.

Simon Cowan (‘Manufacturing of past is doomed’, Ct 4/5/24. P. 48) says Australia cannot insulate itself from the world and its national industry policy can never work or create a renewable energy or viable car manufacturing industry by subsidising local industry.

That statement presupposes Australian governments don’t already hugely subsidise foreign owned industries in Australia & globally BUT they do. 

Those subsidies are hidden from public view by being gifted to foreign owned corporations in the form of licences to mine and take Australia’s natural resources like coal, oil, gas, gold, bauxite, iron ore & other minerals at hugely discounted royalty fees & subject to low taxes; AND then allowing those corporations to sell those Australian owned resources like oil and gas to Australians at world parity prices. Australian governments also allow foreign owned corporations to use transfer pricing and other devices to avoid paying appropriate taxes to Australians for them.

To gauge the huge size of the subsidies involved note that  Australia’s oil, gas, coal & mineral resources are so abundant that Australia could dispense with its unlawful income and other taxes and subsidise EVERY Australian’s lifestyle in the same way that nations like Saudi Arabia & various Gulf States do.

Libya also used its oil revenue to heavily subsidise its population’s lifestyle which was the reason that the US & NATO bombed it back to the Stone Age. Australia avoids this fate by giving foreign, Khazarian Mafia owned banking, mining & other corporations, free or cheap licences to exploit Australians & their nation’s natural resources. Australia’s government also buy protection from the KM’s US & NATO military forces by sending token military contingents to participate in US wars of aggression in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

For good measure Australia also pays subsidies to KM owned arms manufacturing corporations in the form of government purchasing of ridiculously expensive & useless armaments from US & UK corporations typified by our spending A$ 368.5 billion on nuclear submarines to be made available in ten years or more, to make war on China, our biggest trading partner, in 20 years time.

The net result of these hidden subsidies to foreign corporate interests is increasing poverty & inability of young Australians to buy homes & raise  families.

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