The end of the Australian car industry

My Dad had an Austin 6 from 1934, and the Austin Motor Company built a state-of-the-art factory in Sydney in 1950. In 1954 Austin had gone, merged into the British Motor Corporation, which then disappeared into British Leyland in 1969, which had itself gone by 1975. The Button Plan of the 1990s was intended to keep the four remaining manufacturers going, but to gently phase out subsidies. If you look back at it all, the car business didn't ever seem to make anyone lots of money, but it did create jobs.

The car-makers are dismantling themselves, and have done so in the past whenever the returns just didn't add up, and no one was prepared to sweeten their situation. What was the right time to phase Australian-made cars out? In my view there never was such a time, and politically you couldn't declare that the industry would be gone in, say, ten years, and that arrangements would be made to retrain workers. The opposition, from unions, workers, cities and state governments would have been enormous.

The way it has happened is, I think, the way it had to happen. One day recently, the cost of keeping the industry going just got to be too much, and the Federal Government spat the dummy. It was probably easier for a Coalition Government to do it than a Labor Government, but even the latter would finally have had to say, 'Enough is enough'.

Now we are bailing out farmers in drought-stricken Wherever, though Prime Minister Abbott seems to have the drought-breaking skills of Bob Hawke, who did that very shortly after he took office in 1983. I wonder what Cabinet-room arguments there will be about this undertaking, given what has happened to Toyota and SPC-Ardmona. I'll write a piece about it in due course.