In 1980, then Singapore prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, warned that if Australia failed to reform, it risked becoming ‘the poor white trash of Asia’.
At the time, Australia was inward-looking, heavily protected by tariffs, and structurally complacent. Under prime minister Malcolm Fraser and his treasurer John Howard, Australia was grappling with a period of stagflation, economic stagnation combined with high inflation.
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Dimitri Burshtein is a principal at Eminence Advisory. Peter Swan AO is professor of finance at the UNSW-Sydney Business School.
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