When the term outsourcing is used it means taking the functions of a business that don't produce income and contracting them out to other companies that specialise in these fields.
Usual areas for outsourcing are IT, billing and accounting, payroll and office administration.
Indeed small businesses are used to sending their paperwork down the road to the accountant's office or calling the computer shop when the PC won't boot.
Outsourcing can create greater efficiency by allowing another company to assume the costs and risks while providing your business with an SLA driven service for a predicable cost.
Those costs can in turn be placed on another column of the balance sheet providing further tax benefits through smart accounting.
In recent years many medium to large enterprises have moved a lot of their business functions out of the business.
But they have also moved a lot of functions and processes more closely aligned to their own service offerings to outsourced service providers, many of these overseas.
If you ask this of big business or of emerging economies in India, Philippines and Malaysia they will say this is a great idea.
Businesses can maximise profits while minimising costs.
If a company has an International presence they can outsource to another branch and effectively offer these overseas services over their internal network.
But where does this flexibility leave countries with strong currencies and high wages like Australia? The Labour push to introduce a National Broadband Network can only further increase opportunities for companies to outsource their workforce to other lower wage countries.
In fact it won't just be the low income jobs that will be affected such as call centres and manufacturing.
We've already seen those jobs go.
It will also be possible for Australian consumers to consult with Doctors, Lawyers and Accountants in other countries.
You may question why anyone would want to trust a professional from another country with serious health, legal or tax issues? Well what if they've received Australia qualifications and certifications from Australian Universities and associations? And they'll be video conferencing on links so clear you'll feel you're in the same room.
Australian education centres may be affected by the high Aussie dollar but they can also reduce costs by offering more services online to foreign students.
Those students may never have to leave Mumbai, Kuala Lumpar or Manila to get a good Aussie education.
So what will be left for Aussie workers? Well if you can lift a spade or hammer, drive a truck or pour a good cup of coffee you will have job opportunities.
It will also work in your favour if you can sell.
You just need to be prepared (when not working from home) to walk into an office and log into a thin client that offers you a desktop session running on a server thousands of miles away.
When you make a sale and fill in the forms, the product or service will be dispatched or set up on the other side of the world and shipped/emailed to your client.
When they call you incessantly for support it'll be because they don't like having to repeat themselves over and over to your company's call centre staff.
It'll be you who has to do that.
If the Australian government is serious about protecting Aussie jobs it would do away with Payroll tax and other discouragements to business hiring local staff.
It would also provide inducements for companies to hire locally.
After all income tax is a big part of the government's income so it makes sense to encourage local job creation.
Relying on individuals and businesses with dwindling incomes to spend locally is not going to work.
There needs to be GST charged on international parcel deliveries to protect local retail jobs.
Businesses of course can claim this back through the usual means.
And a tax on bandwidth which is getting cheaper with every mile of the NBN would also assist with funding local projects.