Where to from here?

With a trade deficit of over $5 billion and rising it is surprising that government doesn’t see the need to worry.

There seems to be an attitude that once the dollar drops “she’ll be right”; exports will rise with a competitive exchange rate; imports will fall as consumers find goods get more expensive and thus the trade deficit will self correct to a great extent.

That premise might have held true a few years ago but there has been a paradigm shift in business and global trade in the last 2 to 3 years which makes that scenario very unlikely.