The last plant manufacturing refrigerators in Australia will close it's doors in 2015. The Electrolux factory in Orange produces 300,000 Electrolux, Westinghouse and Kelvinator refrigerators each year and employs more than five hundred people, 4.4% of the Orange work force.
Refrigerator production is shared between the Electrolux plants in Australia and Thailand. The Orange plant commenced operations in 1946 and now needs a $ 45 million upgrade. It is simply far cheaper to achieve this at the plant in Thailand, and the Thai wage structure is a quarter of what is required in this country. Electrolux senior management have done the sums - and the outcome was inevitable.
Efforts to head off this closure have included Orange council waiving rates for a ten year period and the state government offering payroll tax relief. The Feds provided a $ 4.7 million clean technology grant - but the high Australian dollar and other adverse costings meant that this relief could not bridge the gap.
This decimation of Australian manufacturing industry is speeding up as globalization brings more low wage countries into the labour force, and there seems many parts of the world that are yet to move from basic agriculture into the factory production scene. Old entrants find their success drives wages higher and opens the door for world of manufacturing to create new opportunities in the never ending search for the lowest priced end product.
The list of things we no longer make in this country is growing longer. Refrigerators join the lack of a local tyre manufacturer and it seems that we are slowly losing the ability to refine the petroleum we produce. The writing is on the wall for the car manufacturing industry, and our past history includes many brands that came - and went. News of any new manufacturing plant opening here is now rare !
Perhaps we need a re-think on what the world needs - and what we have to offer to fill that need.
We have a vast continent situated within a hospitable climate range that allows more than one crop a year. We are ideally positioned to produce the food that an ever hungry - and vastly over populated - world is going to need to survive. It will certainly cost money - and ingenuity - to make Australia the " bread basket of the world " and this is a relatively " dry " continent, but we are surrounded by the sea and we have the northern Monsoon from which to draw water for agriculture. The seven billion people on earth will soon move to ten billion - and that many mouths to feed is moving beyond the resources available.
Opportunity is knocking on our door, and now is the time for our best and brightest to be laying the plans for the future - and putting in place the crop development and infrastructure that will turn Australia into one of the biggest food producers on the planet.
The future for this country is not in making things - our destiny seems to be in growing things !
No comments:
Post a Comment