Queensland's "Buy Local" restorative campaign is hypocritically ignored when the government instead buys cheap-labour Bangladesh t-shirts to promote the campaign itself. The only notably good thing about this is that finally, an Australian government is actually considering ways it can cut costs.
The Bligh Government has made a complete mockery of its “Buy Local” flood recovery campaign after buying cheap imported T-shirts from overseas to promote the program.
The Sunday Mail can reveal public servants even tried to cover up the embarrassing bungle by cutting off the shirts’ tags displaying the country of origin.
The 1500 shirts emblazoned with “Buy local, Back QLD” were to be handed out to promote Premier Anna Bligh‘s Operation Queenslander campaign, touting struggling businesses after the summer natural disasters.
However, the Government has admitted to a “gross error of judgment” in ignoring local manufacturers and instead buying almost $10,000 worth of T-shirts made in Bangladesh and the US.
Insiders believe the Government was trying to buy the shirts on the cheap as the price of $5.12 each totalling $7687 cost less than local shirts priced at up to $10 each.
But the decision left manufacturers such as Cairns-based Shirts North out in the cold.
“Business is a bit slow . . . and we would have appreciated that,” spokeswoman Esme Corrigan said.
Buy local campaigns are merely publicity stunts anyway. We’ve spent the last 30 years demolishing our manufacturing sector and we allow China to manipulate their currency to keep the price of their goods artificially low. We’ve destroyed our ability to compete in any meaningful sense, who cares if the Bligh government buys a few hundred Aussie made t shirts when the rest of the country is addicted to cheap imports?