Technology Loss.

The last car rolls off the assembly line at Holden's Elizabeth plant in South Australia on Friday, October 20.  Ford is gone and Toyota is going.  We will no longer be a country with a manufacturing car industry and that means several thousand well paid jobs will come to an end.

That was probably inevitable because the car industry is an international enterprise and they never seriously intended to base exports from Australia. Tariffs to protect our car manufacturing helped beat off competitors in this home market and the car companies were extracting ever increasing subsidies from the government.  At all times the government was keeping its eye on those well paid manufacturing jobs and every new car built here was becoming a drain on the public purse.

Now we have emerged from behind that defensive tariff shield the new cars on offer here have sharply dropped in price.  The used car market has been decimated because new cars are now within the price range of ordinary people.   The car fleet on our roads is newer and safer now that we are " customers " of the world car industry.

Unfortunately, what seems to have been forgotten is the fate of a vast industry that supplied individual parts that became part of those cars we manufactured here.  It was heavily based in Victoria and South Australia, but it also had factories here in New South Wales.  It emerged in Australia some years back when the car industry cut costs by eliminating stock holdings and converted to a " just in time " manufacturing formulae.  Parts were scheduled to arrive at the factory timed to go immediately into the production lines, delivering a saving.   This encouraged a local supply industry which has now lost its market.

Some of those factories are huge and employ hundreds of people, but a lot are tiny outfits making small trim items and employing just half a dozen people. When we think of cars we visualise metal but a surprising number of components are made of other materials, and this Australian industry has developed the technology needed to make some amazingly complex items.  It is essential that this technology not be dissipated and lost.  The opportunity exists to turn this engineering know-how into new developments and this needs help by way of government support.

Much of this car part manufacturing originated when entrepreneurs saw an opportunity and developed a way to produce what the industry required.  It has been clear for some time that the car industry here was terminating and many of these organizations are probably well advanced in converting car industry production to something entirely different, but it takes time to develop a new product and even longer to have that become commercially viable.

If such people simply close their doors and cease to exist, the people they employed will join the dole queue.   It would make more sense for the government to consider " development grants " to help pay the wages and keep those same people employed while new markets and new products are in the development stage.

This presents an opportunity to restore some of the Australian manufacturing industry that withered away when Chinese cheap labour enticed factories to relocate overseas.  Wages are rising sharply in China and the age is changing to robotics as the means of supply, and that is precisely how small Australian industries managed to secure a place in car manufacturing.   Much of the car component industry comprised technically trained people operating and servicing specially built machines that produced the precision part required in car assembly.   Now that skill needs to be turned in new directions.

Some see the end of car manufacturing here as a disaster, but it does open us to a wider range of car choice and if we can redirect that parts manufacturing sector into entrepreneurial thinking it may restore that past age of manufacturing in this country.