‘I’m all for buying Australian but it’s getting harder and harder to do it’

It’s interesting that under a federal government proposal, a tax will be charged to the consumer everytime a small purchase is made from overseas. The government is looking at between $2 and $7  for any purchases under $1,000.  Apparently, it’s to recover border and biosecurity agencies’ costs as nearly 40 million ‘low value’ parcels arrived in Australia last financial year — roughly two per person.

 The levy would come on top of a new GST charge, which will be added to imported products from July 1, 2018, the 10 per cent goods and services tax will also apply to purchases under $1,000. Packages worth more than $1,000 already attract a levy, but this plan would apply it to all overseas purchases. Do the general public realise how much this could impact the cost of all our purchases? As our manufacturing base has gone down the gurgler thanks to the government and low income overseas producers –+ is it fair that we will now be paying another couple of taxs to buy purchases we can’t or don’t produce in Australia? 

Believe me I would love to see more manufacturing in Australia! For a start,what are our kids and grandkids going to do for a job? Not to mention the consequences should we have any unrest with these countries supplying us with our goods.  Many of these countries are supplying us with the machinery to produce our own goods, so with any unrest comes a major issue to our supplies.

I’m all for buying Australian product and will buy Australian where I can, but that is getting so difficult now. As an example, I have found that the Koala brand of rice seems to be the only Australian brand in the supermarket these day and some shops don’t even  stock it. I would love for someone to enlighten me here, but do supermarkets have to — by law — sell a certain percentage of Australian produced products? It would make ‘buying our own’ that much easier if they did.

Shopping these days can be long and drawn out affair reading the small print to find out where the item came from. There is so much underhandedness with companies today, trying to fool the customer on where a product is made or where it came from.

I work as a hairdresser and beauty therapist. I looked at importing hair colour from overseas so I gathered some samples from a manufacturer in China. The colour chart they sent me was in Italian and English, with an Italian address and nowhere on any of the packaging was there any sign the the product was produced in China. They even say ‘Luxury Italian brand’! When you start looking at all the products we purchase, the stock purchased by our supermarkets and corner stories, we are in for a big increase of costs.

Like many people working from home I buy and sell small amounts of product, which helps my income. It also means I don’t have stock on my shelves left over and am only ordering what the customer wants. Most manufaturers will ship-drop these items ( meaning they send the article straight to the buyer from their factory, saving on shipping costs). All of these products I sell are not produced in Australia.  Yet, all will go up in cost, which must be passed on to the consumer, even though I cannot buy the same product here to sell.

Do you buy ‘Australian made’? How difficult has this process been for you? How do you think the tax to overseas purchases will impact people already struggling with the high cost of living and high mortgages?

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