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It wouldn't matter if people studied more and harder in Australia. Simple economics is at play here. The biggest problem with Australian manufacturing is the cost of labour in general. Even materials that are made here are over priced because of the cost of labour. We cannot compete with countries that can supply labour cheaply.
Australians don't want to work for lower wages and demand all sorts of entitlements and to boot don't work like they should; I know because I have been running a business for 15 years and I have seen it get worse. Korea is one of the few exceptions where high wages and output are matched. Nearly every developed country has this problem now and in the end we the developed world will become the developing world. This will be the cycle of the capitalism. It will always seek the cheapest labour to maximise profit.
So for now labour moves off shore as business owners want to earn profit and manufacturer skill level moves off shore. This is not a government fault either. No government can do anything about this problem. You cannot throw money at this. We have to have a wage adjustment and income adjustment across the board. It has to be wide reaching into all parts of our life including real estate. A decent depression would do the trick and reinvigorate our entire society. We had the chance to do this in 2008 but every government spent up big to prevent a depression. That in my opinion was a mistake for long term viability. It would have meant millions out of work, falling real estate prices, perhaps even high crime rates for quite a while but it would have given us a competitive edge again.
We had this a little during the recession of the 90's, the one we had to have and instigated by the then Hawke/Keating government. We need this again to solve a lot of the problems. Until then manufacture moves off shore and will eventually lead to declining revenues to the point where countries will regress. Comforting thought.
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