Pericles,

Thou speakest truth!

I have seen many small businesses that had the potential to expand chose not to do so when the disincentives, mostly Government inspired, were weighed against the incentives and the dis side won by a large margin.

Clems plan is fine but it is based on a "Business as Usual" era.
Already it is too late to start up an export enterprise as we are at
the end of that era. We need to increase our technical base and Tafe
is the key to being able to do that.
The Hornsby Tafe is closing its arts courses and there is an uproar going on about it.

If the arts courses never reappeared I doubt we would miss them, but
what we did miss was the loss a few years back of the electrical courses.
The winding down of the various electrical courses is having an adverse effect on many employers.

There is a lack of electrical workers of all levels but the training
is not available. One company I know of asked me if there was a member
of the local amateur radio club looking for a job.
At that time, a couple of years ago, he was complaining of TAFE closing courses.
At that time he employed a couple of retired members part time.

We have a just now emerging trend & problem where rather than buy new
devices, they would prefer to have them repaired.
As China winds down the cost of their products will increase. That will drive the trend.

Sorry Clem, but I don't think it will work.

I was running just such a company making high quality high priced brass items, mostly chrome plated. They had to be just right, even a thou or 2 machining error & they did not work properly. Some tried copying, but none succeeded.

Then a copy appeared that worked, & shot our price to bits. WE found they were made in Taiwan, & in desperation we went there too. They produced to our specification, & the product worked perfectly. The real shock was the price.

In Oz the brass to start machining one product cost $5.40 per unit. There was the machining cost, tooling & material to make one plastic bit, & a neoprene [rubber] seal, plus chrome plating & assembly time to add to that.

Imagine my amazement when Taiwan could supply my item, delivered into my store, assembled, & individually packed, for $2.00.

No one has ever been able to tell me why we pay about 5 times the price for brass, produced from our zinc & copper, that the Taiwan manufacturer paid for brass, also produced from our zinc & copper.

While Asian companies can use our raw materials to produce feedstock, for less than a fifth of our price, we have no chance.

Are our costs that ridiculous? Is it our labour costs? Is it government added costs, is it economies of scale, or is it a rip off? I have no idea, but whatever it is, it turns manufacturers into importers, that or they simply die.

Love the idea, don't like it's chances.

Yes Is Mise, we chose not to expand basically because of the problem of getting rid of bad employees. Fortunately the staff did not like getting bludged on, or having to continually fix others mistakes. They proved reasonably good at pushing undesirables out, when I hired the wrong people, but not good enough for it to be worth banking on.

However I also found the profit from expansion was just not worth all the extra effort involved. I really became a bit of a life balance bloke.

Yes Bazz, my son did a marine electrical apprenticeship. Over 70% of starters dropped out, as they could not handle the math. Our schools have got so bad, that even kids who have done math A & B in year 12 don't have enough to handle an electrical apprenticeship. Compare this to 50 years ago, when 15 year olds from year 10 could handle it no problem.

We have a friend, an ex high school Physics teacher, who is now teaching math at a major Brisbane TAFE, & loving it. He has never had such committed students. These kids, even doing things like carpentry, know they need his course to get through their trade, & really work.

Some of the kids tell him he is the first teacher of things academic who ever gave a damn if they learnt something or not.

He quit when the school wanted him to teach senior math 3. He told them he couldn't even do it himself, & asked how he could teach it. He was told not to worry, to just muddle through.

God help the kids with a system, & headmasters like that.

No Hasbeen it is TGAR, better known as "The Great Australian Ripoff".
Just like the $21,500 premium over the US price, $30,000 that Nissan
put on the Leaf Electric car".

Josephus,>>
I was a sales rep for a small manufacturing company we employed 11 factory workers 2 office staff 1 delivery driver and 3 sales reps to cover N.S.W. However other companies began producing similar products and they found it hard to compete so they began to import from China; so for us to stay in business we had to reduce our factory staff to 1 to produce specialist products and retain our higher paid reps and management. Good idea but what products can Australia produce that the Chinese cannot copy.>>

J, I have seen a similar scenario play out in the past 12 months. I know of a small manufacturing company that employed about the same numbers as the business you example. They had several specialty products but half their sales came from a non flammable aerosol mine marking paint.

The non flammable propellant for the paint went up by $30.000 per tonne with the carbon tax (consumers copped a carbon tax and importers and manufacturers copped a “carbon equivalency tax.” The importer of the product went from a stock holding of $200,000 to $750,000. The specialist paint manufacturer went from $4 per can to $8 per can. The mines stopped buying from him and purchased newly imported Chinese product for $4 per can. Chinese product that was not previously in the market.

That business is finished....staff paid out and the owner is scrambling to import Chinese products to stay in business. But his days of manufacturing his lines in Australia are gone. He makes nothing; he is just a middle pair of hands in the transaction now.