Witty Rejoinder said:

Do you end up watching Hastie on ‘Insiders’ PP?

Not the whole interview, but the various reports on it published by the major news outlets.

I don’t think there is anything much we can do in the short term for grater self-reliance for critical goods and services. It needs direct government intervention in the market to subsidise or fund these industries. We have decades of ideological orthodoxy and bureaucratic inertia that the market knows best and any government intervention is by definition “bad”. To me, that argument doesn’t hold any more in a post rules based order world. Governments need to single out the critical things from the unimportant things and direct policy accordingly in spite of the neo-liberal orthodoxy.

So there you have it. I am no longer a free market capitalist and global free trader based on comparastive advantage. I think that is yesterday’s circumstances.