What of it!? This is the story of our economic life as the A-hole of the world! Invent or build something that earns a quid! Then sell it to the world! And endlessly repeated!

One recalls a bloke called Lance Handcock, who was an old-time prospector, who found mountains of iron ore so pure two lumps of the stuff could be welded together.

Went hat in hand to virtually every Australian government seeking start-up finance. Naturally, those same pollies thought he was like them and boosting it all over the joint?

Labor supported a car industry here and we made cars based on superseded models, mostly yank tanks. Until the Japanese arrive with Nissan and Toyota variants. And not enough market share for five players, without an export market.

A problem exacerbated when power prices were larger than the wages bill and economists who didn't give a rat's, thought we would do better as a service economy with some very big holes in the ground.

Thought we could dig and sell more and more coal for the next 700 years when in truth the longest any mine has now got tops out at fifty very courageously optimistic years!

No lessons were learned by the economic illiterates at the helm, as they kept repeating with broken record rhetoric, the government (i.e. Australia) Has no business in business! And set about destroying every semblance of cooperative capitalism (and dependant country towns) wherever they could.

Privatized or corporatised everything not nailed down! And made our tax system the most complicated in the world, enabling more holes than Swiss cheese!

And set about selling our heritage and the nation's prospects down the river of no return!? And confront viable solutions like rabbits caught in headlight glare as they fight with rare courage over the spoils of economic defeat!

Holden? Why did you ever bother!?

Roll over and beg for a tummy rub and junk the only viable solutions sight unseen in the process! The cost of energy alone created the disaster that is our manufacturing (former) economy!
Alan B.

When cars were simple, just a motor, gearbox diff & body, with a few bits like steering & lights we could compete, particularly when protected by tariffs & the huge cost of transporting import cars. With fair wages & low power costs we had a viable industry for local assembly & or manufacture.

Then the problems, cars got more efficient. People could happily use a smaller car, when it's performance equaled the larger cars previous performance.

Then along came the Button Plan, that dramatically reduced tariff protection.

Worse, roll on roll off ships cut the cost of transporting complete cars to very little.

Now cars become much more complex, lots of systems , ABS EFI, ESP & a host of other systems, all of which require outside suppliers. There are as many systems in a small car as a large one, so Oz can't sell a local small car for the cost of production, with all these systems, & our expensive labour & electricity. Large cars are their only viable product.

Again worse, people now want small shopping trolleys that we can't economically produce, or a recreation vehicle for weekends. We can't compete in the crew cab ute/4WD wagon market, as ours is too small to be profitable, & the big 3 don't want us exporting, as we are not profitable enough, compared to their Asian factories.

The industry is now dead, just it hasn't found where to lay down.

Now add a union hierarchy that, perhaps to justify their existence, keeps pushing for higher wages from an industry that can't cover it's costs, & the end comes suddenly.

The end of an error.

@Alan B.

Correction:

Lang mate, Lang. As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Hancock

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