OzVoyager.com

At the risk of offending friends both at home and abroad when posting on here I tend to wear my political heart on my sleeve. One of the most over used propaganda tools of right wing conservatism when trying to justify the mass move off shore to cheap labour countries is pretending its rules and regulations of their home country strangling business. This is a total sham, and I for one see no value in contacting a bank or an insurance company only to have an overseas call centre answer me in a heavy accent with no localised knowledge whatsoever. Simple realities are that Factories and Offices close down for the reason that there is no way a high standard of living country can compete with off shore .50cents a hr. labour. This is the new reality of the 21st century, in a high tech world. The moment you open your door of a morning to go to work you are directly competing with someone on the other side of the world doing your job for one tenth of the price. Not only that they can deliver their services or products almost as quickly as what can be achieved on home soil. Globalisation lifts third world countries out of poverty and that is a good thing. However unless the economic pie becomes much larger & one would hope that it would. Then the losers are those who had a bigger slice of the pie in the first place. So it is a two edged sword one delivering cheaper products to the consumer and the other at the cost of jobs on home soil. In my view the only answer for the West to maintain their standard of living is by doing things smarter and concentrate on skilling their workforce at level developing countries would find hard to match. Not only that by going down the clean energy road the West is much better geared to do that quicker than any of the developing countries. This puts the West with more of a winning edge, in other words Green Technology and that could become the next big thing. That is why carbon pricing worldwide would create this golden opportunity for those who have their eye on the future.