The noble and learned Viscount referred to Article 11 of Agreement 1152 with Canada, according to which tariffs must not exceed a level that gives producers in the United Kingdom a fair chance of competition, and then there is a provision that generally serves to make the above completely ineffective and ineffective; special attention to industries that are not fully established. Do the obligations I mentioned give the British manufacturer a fair chance at competition? This is not the case. And what does “industries that are not fully established” mean? What manufacturing industries in the dominions are fully established? All industries are struggling to establish themselves; it does so under tariff protection, and the direction to the Tariff Board in Australia has always been to grant a tariff that would protect these industries so that they can fully establish themselves. The noble and erudite Viscount said it was easy to mock the tariff council, saying its decisions were biased and perhaps not free of political influence. Well, Mr. Bennett obviously thought in 1930 that the Canadian Tariff Office was somewhat biased, but not in the direction he would have liked, because he fired him because he was not protective enough. The noble and learned Viscount said two weeks ago that Canada would not be able to raise tariffs on British goods under the agreement, although I admit he added “as far as I can understand the agreement.” The matter does not stay there. Having set out these two principles in both Canada and Australia, it is expressly provided for the creation of a court before which producers in the United Kingdom have an unlimited right of access to examine the facts and determine what protection is necessary to satisfy this condition and the report of that court must be submitted to Parliament and thus become a public document – open to scrutiny by the British Manufacturer and also the Dominion consumer. In addition, there is an explicit provision that protection against production in the United Kingdom can only be strengthened after an investigation and report from that court. It is, of course, possible to mock the court and say that a Dominion tribunal cannot be trusted to be impartial and impartial. From this point of view, we have not approached these negotiations.
We believed that we had just as much right to trust the fairness of an Australian or Canadian court as we should have had the impartiality of a British court. We believe that with the creation of a tribunal before which all public rights should exist, whose relationship should be public property 1124 and whose task should be to investigate the facts, we have given the producers of this country very real protection and a very great advantage. At the 1887 conference, the most important speaker, the leading spirit of the colonies, Mr. Deakin, was the Attorney General and former Premier of Victoria. His ideal was Australia for Australians, and he advocated the protection of extreme character with the slogan “Australia for Australians”. This policy then required that industries be created and subsidized with public money at every opportunity to make Australia independent of the homeland both commercially and politically. This idea is widespread not only in Australia, but also in Canada. Energy and money were distributed in the past to create industries and manufacturing enterprises across the seas that had no chance of succeeding in fair competition against the experience, technical knowledge and specialized industries of the motherland. The industries that have been established and survived in this way are large and numerous, but they do not form an exhaustive list of industries in which this country is still pending and which will be protected from competition in the future. Having obtained the withdrawal of the now forbidden form of competition for the homeland means that whatever foreign countries can do to destroy our trade – and they will continue to do their best – our workers have a growing trade within the empire and a certain sympathetic market under these Ottawa agreements.
We also collected information on tariffs, quotas, voluntary export restrictions, and other variables that could affect trade flows over the period, such as . B the presence or absence of international cartels. To quantify the impact of the 1931-32 shift to protection, we compared the trade flows actually observed from 1931 onwards with the counterfactual flows that would have been observed if tariffs and quotas had remained unchanged between 1930 and 1938. .