Productivity Commission chairman Gary Banks has encouraged continued tariff reform, particularly protection for car manufacturers, to increase national productivity.
Banks referred to the recent failed Doha round in Geneva and said it was not an excuse for special interests to get in the way of reform. “The latest multilateral World Trade Organization failure should, if anything, reinforce the good sense of Australia pressing on with its own reforms,” he stated in a speech at the University of Queensland on Wednesday night.
Industry supporters – including trade unions, car makers Holden, Toyota and Ford and the Victorian government – have asked that the government retain the current tariff rate at 10 percent rather than reduce it to five percent in 2010.
Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr has put his support behind car manufacturers perceiving tariffs as a “second-order issue when considered against all the pressures faced by manufacturing”.
Banks says manufacturing should not have any special place: “Maintaining any particular industry should never be an end in itself.”
