Relative Assistance to Agriculture and Manufacturing since Federation

The general level of assistance which has gone to farmers and other agricultural producers has been a major political issue since the beginning of Federation in Australia. From 1901 butter producers received protection from imports in the form of a prohibition of imports of margarine and butter substitutes “unless coloured and branded as prescribed” and sugar producers received a bounty on cane grown and harvested by white labour from 1902. New forms of assistance to particular agricultural producers came in every succeeding decade. From the 1920s Australian farmers sought increased assistance to offset the high levels of assistance given to manufacturers of import-competing products from the Australian Tariff. In this paper we seek to quantify the levels of assistance received by agricultural producers of the major crops and products in Australia and the average for the whole sector from the time of Federation, and then to compare this with the level of assistance provided to the Manufacturing sector.