Australia celebrated when we got Vegemite back in Australian hands. Bega Cheese bought the iconic brand from US multinational Mondelez International, (formerly Kraft.) The $460 million dollar corporate acquisition sparked a glittering fireworks display of patriotic fervour.
But what did it get us?
The new Australian owners promptly foisted on us Blend 17. New, premium and expensive, a less quintessentially Australian Vegemite you could hardly imagine. Consumers hated it — after being launched at double the price of Vegemite, Blend 17 was reduced to less than half in order to clear the shelves.
Image credit: reddit user mrchips1231
But at the level of corporate backlash, the dominant sound was silence.
I find it hard not to imagine the counter-factual where such a spin-off was launched after the sale of a proud Australian brand to a foreign company. The outrage would have been palpable. Radio hosts would not have shut up about it, from Fitzy and Wippa all the way through to Alan Jones. The absence of a furious frothing backlash is amazing.
The quick withdrawal of the “posh” Blend 17 reminds us ownership isn’t everything. In the end, the consumer is sovereign. A foreign company can’t survive without meeting local tastes. Neither can a local brand. In a competitive marketplace the preferences of the owner are not nearly so important as those of the consumer.
This is why haters of foreign ownership in Australia are wrong*. The foreign companies that buy into Australia are not owning us. They’re serving us.
Is Made in Australia just ‘fuck off we’re full’ in fancy clothes?
In few other domains is discrimination on the basis of national origin so warmly applauded as the economic. Perhaps because economic activity is measured on a national basis we think of economies as things that are inherently national.
If so, this is an example of reification, where the abstract becomes concrete. A concept adopted for measurement shapes up our understanding and eventually our behaviour. We fight to defend what we see as ours, waving back trade flows and investment flows we imagine as foe not friend. ‘Buy Australian’ campaigns run hot and on change.org signatures rack up, petitioning against foreign ownership.
Economies aren’t national though. The only countries where economic borders match the ones in the atlas are isolated autarkic regimes like North Korea. Internationalisation is getting faster. According to the World Bank, international trade flows are now over 50% of the value of all global production, up from 25% in 1960. Meanwhile foreign direct investment flows are equivalent to 2.5% of global GDP, up from half a per cent in 1960.
The idea we can win without everyone else winning too is increasingly outdated.
A little bit of give and take
Australia benefits from foreign companies coming here and buying assets in order to serve us. In the 1920s Vegemite itself looked doomed until the company that invented it — Fred Walker & Company — entered a joint venture with the Kraft Cheese company. The new larger joint company gave the scale and heft needed to overcoming consumer doubts about its taste and write it into our national story forever.
As anyone who drives a Ford ute will tell you, foreign ownership is no impediment to a product being iconically Australian. Vegemite has been made in Melbourne forever, but since 1935, when Fred Walker died, Vegemite was owned by Kraft, which itself went through a dizzying array of corporate structures including the tobacco conglomerate Phillip Morris. Through all that time we expertly – but carefully – spread it onto our toast and crunched down just as the butter melted.
Australia also takes advantage of the chance to invest in other countries. An Australian retailer owned malls in London – right up until Westfield sold them to a big French company on Tuesday. An Australian toll road owner charges Americans to drive on Washington DC’s Beltway. That certainly doesn’t make the Beltway Australian.
Foreign investment comes and goes. With all the cheap money floating round in the world at the moment, Bega Cheese could easily be bought out again and Vegemite could pass out of Australian ownership once more. I hope that if that happens we understand it makes little difference. The spread is Australian no matter what.
* There are exceptions:
- Where foreign companies are intimately tied up in state apparatuses (hello to the Chinese state-owned enterprises);
- Where the assets are especially sensitive and significant. (NSW senators are firmly in this second category. Honesty even renting them out is probably a bad idea).
Stupidity has no national origin. Would you care to tell us how the tax dodgers like Chevron, et al are serving us. Perhaps the gas companies? Serving us be damned. They are following money. Hello also to SingTeln via Optus satellites. No doubt some foreign companies are good citizens, getting harder to find though.
Buy a packet of Campbell Soup Saladas and try and remember when they were more like the picture on the packet rather than the wafer within.
“Is Made in Australia just ‘fuck off we’re full’ in fancy clothes?”
No it isn’t! Well, not “fancy” (having once had the job of putting that label over the Made in Taiwan stamp); but it is the Power Balance bracelet of yore.
lol. you’re such a fake leftist.
…
While nation states exist as the most potent expression of politics – and one World government is never happening as far as I can tell – then the notion that our government is supposed to be looking after us will persist. The Japanese government looks after the people of Japan; I expect the Australian government to look after the people of Australia.
We don’t get a say in who the Japanese government are so I’m not expecting them to be particularly concerned with the welfare of the Australian people, and vice versa.
Now, the article is trying to make the case that economics exists entirely separate from the politics, and that the realities of globalization mean the parochial gaze is simply self-defeating self-delusion.
That’s been the neo-liberal argument for the last 40 years. But it is false – the political and the economic are intimately entwined, and this ‘TINA’ argument about globalisation is where the real self-delusion lies. Trump and Brexit are recent potent examples where globalisation itself is being rejected because the on-the-ground impacts on peoples’ lives of globalisation are so profound.
People want a decent, secure, job with a decent wage. People want to be safe at work. People want their environment to be protected. The implication of the globalisation described in this article is that these expectations are not reasonable – we can’t protect Australian wages, job conditions, OHS, environmental protections in a globalised economy because the people of China or Bangladesh or Africa are ‘equivalent’ pieces in the global economy, and they don’t get protected at work or the same environmental standards etc … so what has happened has been that the things we have valued in Australia – secure, safe, stable, well paid work, and environmental protections – are eroded day-in-day-out because of competitive pressures in the globalised economy. And it makes people stressed, unhappy, angry. And that turns it directly into a political problem that manifests itself in the governments of nation states, with the demand of the public that those governments look after the people they are responsible for – Americans first, Australians first, etc.
The globalised economy may seem inevitable and ‘good’, but when the political action demanded by the people manifests itself at the national level – because that’s the level that exists that people have any control over – it maybe indicates that globalisation has hit a wall and we need to rethink some of the fundamentals.
Regardless of what you say about the global economy prevailing, if the politics turns any more sour than it already is the global economy will be in for a rude wake up call. Fascism, populism, war are the endpoints here if we don’t start having a system where our governments better look after us by making sure our economies are working for us and not heading for some lowest common denominator. That this revolves around the Nation state is simply because that’s the only structure that people see as having any power.
Yes, Trump destroyed globalized capitalism just like he drained the swamp and locked her up, Lol.
Many people favour local ownership not because of some sentimental patriotism as the writer implies, but because it means local employment.
As for no country now having much in the way of “economic borders”, what about the EU?