Trump’s trade vision? Been there. Wore the saggy undies

People talk about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, but I grew up behind a Tariff Curtain. If Americans want to know what their future holds, they should have a look at Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.

I’ll spare you the full “Four Yorkshiremen” routine of “we were so poor, we lived in shoebox at middle o’ motorway”, but it certainly wasn’t a land of material plenty.

Even in middle-class families, children were dressed in hand-me-downs, increasingly tatty once you arrived at child number four or five. A father with an office job would have precisely five shirts in the wardrobe. Few people, in my memory, had more than a couple of pairs of shoes.

Having a refrigerator was a point of pride, particularly if you had paid it off.Credit: Getty Images

People would save all year for Christmas, with the big banks offering a “Christmas Club” account into which you could deposit each week, with penalties for a withdrawal before December. You’d then be able to buy your loved one something special. In many cases, this was a new set of underpants and – here’s the thing – it was a gift which would often leave the recipient genuinely pleased.

They’d been wearing saggy undies for months, unable to afford the upgrade.

I’m not saying, of course, that families don’t live in poverty in today’s Australia; but in the Australia of the 60s and 70s, the struggle to “make ends meet” involved pretty much everyone except the wealthy.

When I was researching my book about the period, The Land Before Avocado, the social researcher Hugh Mackay offered me access to the notes from his earliest focus groups – recorded at the end of the 1970s and involving middle-class suburban women.

Donald Trump holds up his chart of “reciprocal tariffs” at the announcement event in Washington.Credit: Getty

The women were entirely preoccupied with making ends meet. Several talked about having a husband who insisted on having steak for dinner – “I think his manhood depends on it, or something,” said one – and how this meant they had to hunt down cheap alternatives for themselves and the kids.

“We’ve gone from forequarter to sausage-meat,” says another. “I have to dress it up in a lot of different ways so the kids won’t complain.”

It wasn’t only food that posed a challenge, even in well-off families. Buying a fridge or a washing machine was a campaign waged over years, involving weekly or monthly payments through lay-by or hire-purchase. The columnist Ross Campbell wrote weekly about his family, living a typical middle-class life in Sydney’s Greenwich. In one column from 1970, he discusses the pride and excitement when their TV set had finally been paid off. To mark the occasion, the department store even sent a “purple certificate”, designed to be put on display.

In the end, we even lost the ability to make cars. Australian-made clothing and footwear became a luxury item.

The Campbell family were not the only ones to feel pride in their electronic equipment. The historian Alistair Thomson has studied photos taken by new migrants to post to their relatives back home. An extraordinary percentage, he says, are of the family’s new fridge, with the door open to show the produce inside.

That fridge, most likely, would still be being paid off through hire-purchase, although it was also very common to rent appliances such as fridges, washing machines and televisions.

In today’s Australia, I repeat, there are many people living in poverty – and plenty still renting their appliances – but there’s also a big chunk of the population who’ll own two or three television sets, purchased without much struggle.

It wasn’t always so. People cite March 1, 1975 as the moment colour television came to Australia. That’s technically correct, but in that first month less than four per cent of households could afford the upgrade. The new sets were beyond reach for most people. Lucky was the family with a neighbour who owned a colour set and was willing to let you watch.

From 1983 onwards, the Hawke government slowly took down the trade barriers that had created this over-priced world. TVs became cheaper, as did a whole range of goods from cars to clothing.

Yes, there was a downside to the decades of free trade that followed. As one Herald letter writer pointed out this week, Australia’s manufacturing base was smashed. In the end, we even lost the ability to make cars. Australian-made clothing and footwear became a luxury item.

Globalisation also fuelled a rise in inequality: its fruits were not distributed equally. And the flood of cheap products encouraged waste and environmental harm – whether it was fast fashion, designed to be worn once and then abandoned, or a dodgy toaster which became far cheaper to throw-out than to fix.

All this is true, but before we cheer on Trump and his new era of protectionism, it’s worth remembering what life was like behind the Tariff Curtain.

In Australia, it meant an inefficient and expensive car industry, protected by tariffs that peaked at 57.5 per cent in the 1980s. It meant years of hire-purchase payments to buy the smallest of appliances. It meant sausage meat every night for a middle-class mum and her kids. It meant a world in which a girl from a relatively well-off family would be bought her first brand-new dress as a celebration for turning 16 or passing her final exams. And it meant wearing a pair of saggy undies right up until Christmas Day.

Has Trump got a point? Only if you focus entirely on the pleasure of sliding into a snug, new pair.

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