Therefore, when people only buy Australian goods in the erroneous belief that they are making Australia better off they are keeping company with the victims of snake-oil merchants. If any company engaged in the kind of misleading practices that the Buy Australian campaign has used it would quickly find itself in court, and rightly so. People need to be continually reminded that imports are a benefit that has to be paid for. The real price of imports is exports. It is exports that pay for imports.
All Australian exports are really demands for foreign goods.
The relationship between exports and imports would be perfectly transparent in a barter economy but unfortunately money acts as 'veil' when it comes to exchange, giving the false impression that goods exchange against money instead of other goods. Simply put, exports are the price of imports. It can be easily seen that any measures that reduce imports must reduce the demand for Australian exports. This is a fundamental fact that protectionists dishonestly ignore. Failure to comprehend the true nature of foreign exchange has made the layman easy prey for protectionist snake-oil merchants.