Howes is likely damage the interests of Australian consumers and achieve nothing to protect his union

Comments on Paul Howes “China's free trade cheating threatens our jobs”, 17/02/2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/chinas-free-trade-cheating-threatens-our-jobs/story-e6frg6zo-1226007170647


Howes is the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union.

He claims "The AWU represents workers in numerous sectors harmed by China's policies, including steel, aluminium extrusion, glass and timber products."

He said "That's why the union's national conference voted yesterday to back a campaign to promote Australian companies, capabilities and jobs. We worry about the future of work opportunities for our 135,000 members."

He claims that "Unfortunately, China continues to adopt many dumping and subsidy practices that are in direct violation of the obligations it signed up to when it joined the WTO."

If that is the case, then it should have been very easy to use anti-dumping provision to deal with them.

But then he also alleges that "Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that our anti-dumping system is simply weak - and other nations take advantage of our weakness."

He appears to find problems with all others including out customs services and anti-dumping agencies. But could it be he is the source of those problems?

It raises a question whether any of those is true or not, or whether he is creating new 'WTO rules' in terms of anti-dumping.