While most commentators have welcomed the Reserve Bank's inflation-dampening interest rate rise, interest payments are part of the direct expenses of doing business.
Hence the latest move will bring additional costs of debt servicing for industry.
In addition, higher interest rates will probably further strengthen the Australian dollar.
Increased debt servicing costs and a stronger dollar put particular pressure on the trade-exposed activities involved in export markets and in competing with imports. Trade-exposed industries now have to find cost savings to retain their competitiveness.
Victorian companies and jobs are more vulnerable to general cost increases than those in other states, because of the state's prominent manufacturing base and its strengths in exporting educational services.
Success in educational services owes much to Victoria's relatively low costs compared with other advanced English-speaking regions. That advantage has been hitched to Melbourne's solid educational infrastructure.
In the case of manufacturing, although this only directly provides 14 per cent of state income, the activity is far more important than this.
It has a strong interface with traditional suppliers of energy materials and the like. In addition, its size is understated because occupations ranging from accountant to yardman, traditionally located within workforces are now outsourced.
Manufacturing in Victoria has undergone a revolution from the inefficient inward-looking sector of 30 years ago. It has adapted to the virtual eradication of tariff protection and to China's increasing dominance.
That country's superiority in basic internationally-traded manufacturing goods is set to continue. The pattern is perhaps as inevitable as that which is taking place in world trade in basic agricultural products.
Australia, North America and other land-rich areas are taking the lead in commodities such as wool, cotton, feedstock and wheat.
The future for other nations in agriculture is in particular niches and as value-adding producers. The same is true for manufacturing, where Australia has strengths in scientific instruments and cars.
With manufacturing, Labor leader Kevin Rudd has offered $500 million to bankroll promising new ventures.
Unfortunately, any such subsidy is likely to prove as disastrous as the government support provided 50 years ago. This created the ossified industrial structure that has been transformed by reforms over the past 20 years.
Politicians' unsuitability for picking winner industries is exemplified by their suggestions that the car industry develop an Oz Prius. Just as Top Gear trumps Carbon Cops, instead of the politically-preferred environment-friendly product, hard-nosed commercial operators have chosen muscle cars as Australia's vehicle niche.
The global market is no place for politicians to be wandering around with magic wands, teams of appointed "experts" and bucketfuls of cash. It is a place where all players face far more intensive competition than in previous years.
Australia is finally emerging with a lean, mean, globally-competitive manufacturing sector integrated with that of the rest of the world.
Currency changes and other shocks will bring ebbs and flows in its fortunes. And the modern business cannot afford to be distracted by schemes forged by politicians who lack business experience.
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