I cannot help but wonder, if the bosses of business know something that we do not?

Why are there a number of businesses off loading assets, like Shell or bailing out of this country altogether, such as the car manufacturers?

More importantly what does it mean for the future of Australia?

Are these businesses like the proverbial rats deserting the sinking ship?

Yep, but why would any company hang around to lose money.

When energy got too dear, they got out of the US. Now the fracking boom has brought energy costs to something more reasonable, they are flooding back home, followed by the Germans, deserting the sinking ship of Europe. BMW & a large German chemical company have just announced new plants to be built in the land of the free.

Unlikely to happen here, we won't let free enterprise price energy. Our only chance is the other way. Only if ocean transport becomes too expensive to import goods, as it was 50 years ago, will we see local production grow again. Fortunately we have a huge amount of shale gas.

Isn't it typical of Labor governments that they rip us off with stupid energy costs, then use even more money to try to keep the union jobs.

Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Always profits rule.
And always these firms had no intention of giving money away and had plans to go.
Our dollar drove them away.
And very cheap labour in other countrys

Too true Belly.
I suspect in twenty years time we will not recognise the Australia we have known.
It will be a very different place.
SD

Wolly B.
Our oil production fell from near 1 million barrels a day in 2000.
It is now 450,000 barrels a day and falling at about 6% per year.
There is no point in having six or seven oil refineries operating with
such writing on the wall.
All refineries will be closed on the next couple of years.
Then 100% of petrol & diesel will be imported with all the supply risks that implies.
It is all symptoms of the fact that we have arrived at peak oil.
Companies like Shell have been spending very large increased amounts
of money on search but to no avail, their resources have been falling for years.

Welcome to the post peak oil world.

Wooly B, when businesses here are called upon to pay the highest wages, provide the best working conditions, then get hit with a great big tax, not to mention a HUGE SLICE of profits if you're a miner, the time comes when the risks simply outweigh the rewards, and that thine has come.

As for the high dollar, if governments were to put mechanisms in place to protect business from the rising dollar, I doubt that would make them stay.

The fact is that every single expense here is too high. Not only that, but their own government won't buy locally made cars, so what hope do they have.

Woolby & Rehctub,
It is simpler than that.
With falling Australian crude oil input the cost of operating the refineries
is constant but the profit falls due to less output.
On top of that the large Singapore refineries are more efficient anyway.
The result is the oil companies can land petrol & diesel here cheaper
than we can import oil (plus our own oil) and produce petrol & diesel.
They are now exporting our oil, eventually 100% of it.
That is why Shell, Mobil etc are getting out.
BP may be different, as WA is so isolated from the eastern states.

The relevant data is
Australian crude = 450,000 barrels a day
Declining at 6% a year.
Australian consumption = 1,000,000 barrels a day approx.
The writing is clearly on the wall.
Convert trucks to CNG or rail.
Convert cars to CNG or electric.

Welcome to the post peak oil world.

My gut feeling is that Australia is about to burst like a balloon that gets a needle stuck into it.

No Wooley it will just deflate.

All indicators were up yesterday, which stunned Hockey and co. But they never mentioned that.
Doom and gloom will not get you anywhere, Our GDP has hat an all time high without any surge from mining. The downside is we are borrowing 288 million / day. Up 130 mill / day from labor.

579, don't get exited about the ups & downs, we are on the bumpy plateau.

Baz, Shaggy, Butch, thanks guys.

Currently I work in & out of the mining & service industries as a fitter, mostly in the Pilbara & around OZ. When not out on mine sites breathing dusts of various minerals and elements I work in the defence, electrical & refrigeration industry - primarily construction, maintenance & research. During the past few years, these sectors have gone through many ups & downs. Very few of them positive for Australia though, given the rebates on "Renewables" have now been scrapped.

The overwhelming concern is that big players have gone 'off shore' & most if not all construction projects here in NT/WA are built in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore with bigger components floated over and assembled on site...by surprise surprise 457 Visa tradies. Most are paid little more than $15.00 an hour. Then shepherded away by their minders, eat their cribs away from the locals, and never allowed to talk to anyone nearby. The amount of time I have seen spent by construction companies on doing re-works on sites are astronomical, the costs are staggering, quite often blowing out the projects by years. Still our governments condone this, while local people are shut out.

The current Darwin Inpex LNG construction - hardly any 'locals' as in Darwin/NT tradies on site, lots of FIFO's with all the associated living away from home allowances staying at the Howard Springs camp for their 4 weeks on, 1 week off rosters. Too many overseas workers here.

Manufacturing has been dead in Oz for 3 decades or more, Fraser kicked it off, & Hawke and Keating killed it off well and truly. Since then our vehicle and other major manufacturing has been on life support.

Yes, as Lord Louis Mountbatten once said when rescued from a sunken cruiser in WWII, & I paraphrase him here "...when the ship sinks all the muck floats to the surface..."

Oz as we knew it, with Holdens, Fords and Valiants rusting away in paddocks is long gone. Hang onto the flotsam in the new era being Geelys, Great Walls and Hyundai I suppose.

Albie Manton in Darwin, I also work in the mining service industry and quite simply can not believe the money I am paid.

In fact, just one days over time pays more than a full week as a butcher.

The sad part is, we have made a rod for oir own backs as wages MUST come down or we will resist at our peril.

As for457's they should be stopped immediately because our jobs sector is in train wreck mode and we will need every job we can find, even if wages are cut to more realistic levels.

The days of the gravy train are gone.

Wolly B,
I suspect the ship has already sunk and what is occurring in salvage.
Australia has yet to suffer a global financial meltdown. It wii ans sooner than we think.
The whole country id propped on real estate values.
Those values are false and corrupt and finance is fostered in turn by inflated property values.
Mining is the only real support prop in the fiscal wall that remains reasonable solid although there are signs of it faltering.
Shell has left the house and now QANTAS is foundering.
Foreign capital is circling the Aussie Icons like sharks in the ocean around a sinking ship.
Unemployment will rise because there is no manufacturing industry left in Australia.
I live in a major tourist town (Cairns) and there were only 6 jobs advertised in the Saturday Job market in hospitality and two those were for trawler captains.
Will the last person out please turn off the lights.

qantas is reducing its work force, so is this the beginning of the end for qantas?

It is a step towards the end of the airline.
It will still take a long time, but it is inevitable.
QANTAS will not be on its own and many airlines have already preceded it.
As the fares rise their passenger profile will change, first the casual
person going interstate for an event related to their sport or hobby
will end and then next family events, low priority business trips and
the airlines will be left with the CEOs & politicians.

Then they can close Mascot and move operations to Baddgeries Creek.
The government by then will be starving for assets to sell and the
runways in Botany Bay will make terrific sites for blocks of units
with water views to sell to Chinese businessmen on the run.

To become serious again, but I wasn't joking anyway, the large increase
in the use of video conferencing is the writing on the wall.

Airlines have no future and I notice we are now paying $130 a barrel
for oil and is another turn on the screw on the airlines.
Note, if last years loss on QANTAS is repeated they may shutdown
by July because they cannot trade while insolvent.

Wolly B,
QANTAS will go.
A shame but it has outlived its usefulness.
If they had not tried to keep up with the world and concentrated on their niche market and their quality control they might have survived.
How do you compete with an airline owned by an oil sheik whose daily oil income amounts to the price of a new airliner.
Now they are about to lose their exclusivity in the Cairns to Horn Island market.
TAA and Ansett were good airlines until they fell foul to the vanity of world stages.

I note that Virgin is also operating at a loss, so I wonder how long
before they are looking for a handout.
The fares seem cheap at present but the rise in fuel prices that will
occur around 2017 will probably mean a big reduction in services.

For the airlines, but not the taxpayer, when the politicians realise
they will have to get to Canberra by train they will quickly find the money.

There is no solution, eventually we will have to live without airlines.
It has been done before you know !

Speculating on the future is fun, of course. It is a useful vehicle through which we can put on display all our innermost fears, prejudices and exasperation with the present.

What we should not do though is paint the past in quite such rosy colours...

>>TAA and Ansett were good airlines until they fell foul to the vanity of world stages.<<

TAA and Ansett were a duopoly whose rape and pillage of their customer base bordered on the criminal. They flew to the same cities, at the same times, every day, and between them maintained exorbitant prices under the complete fiction of being in "competition".

Then, as now, there was no entity with the power (or the inclination) to curb such rip-offs, so my business, and many others, were bilked every time we needed to fly anywhere.

I remember clearly how the establishment resisted every single attempt to create a proper market, managing to squeeze out one competitor after another with some extremely dubious practices.

And I also that when we finally managed to get some decent competition from a company willing to take them on - despite having to operate from makeshift terminals etc. etc. - how the prices tumbled. A return flight between Sydney and Melbourne settled down (after the initial slash-and-burn discounting) from around $650 to around $250.

And the prices have remained in that region ever since. Amazing.

TAA and Ansett "good" airlines? In a pig's arse, as John Elliott was so fond of saying.

Pericles,
Sorry, I didn't mean they were good in the 'nice' sense I meant as an airline they worked well.
I still have my cardboard Ansett credit card.
Certainly the last person you would trust in a business deal would be Sam Abels.
He shafted me over Ansett ParcelFast.
Anywhere in Australia to anywhere in Australia $5.00. It cost me five courier companies because all he wanted was the courier accounts for TNT.