Ford Australia expected to cease local production from 2016

[wai]

One of the problems with the local car industry is that they believe the government will always bail them out. They have the attitude of the banks where they also believe they are too big to fail.

We need a vehicle manufacturing industry, purely because of the spin off and multiplier effect it has. The problem is that money gets thrown at it without any conditions applied. We have Liberal governments who handed money over and never required any accounting for where it went. Similarly Labor governments have done the same thing.

If we think about it for a moment, us tax payers have handed over money in the billions of dollars over to an industry where little has changed. For that sort of investment, we should have a top class vehicle manufacturing industry. Instead, without any for of post implementation audit, we still have an ancient set of manufacturing facilities that produce vehicles that the public do not want to buy.

Where has all the money gone?

The apparent solution is to throw even more money at it, only this time it will go to the workers who have lost their livelihoods in the form of retraining. The problem is to do what? What other industry do we have that such workers would be able to be trained to work in?

Unfortunately, as the debacle in the car industry shows, governments are hopeless at picking winners, so whatever they pick is not likely to be the saviour. We have little or no manufacturing industry left.

Ford has said that they will keep a research and design presence here. The problem is that without a manufacturing facility here, they will be working with one arm tied behind their backs.

I have no issue with taxpayers helping such an industry, but only if there are tight controls on how and where that money is spent. At the moment our taxes go to support industries in other countries. Remember the "pink bats"? That was implemented to kick start a local energy saving industry by getting insulation manufacturers to increase their capacity so that they could export product. All it did was increase the capacity of Chinese insulation manufacturers.

Unfortunately we have people in government who simply do not know what they are doing. Of course they say they could get better jobs in the private sector. I would love to see that.

As usual, it is the workers who will feel the full force of this.

[QBDentFree]

As i said before, Australia is stuck in a backwards "this is how we've always done it" mentality when it comes to many industries, especially farming and vehicle manufacturing.

Why should Joe Public have to subsidise an industry that is not sustainable just becasue its been around for a while and hasn't been bothered to move with the times to be relevant/self sufficient?

The problem for Ford Australia is that we have the highest base salary of any OECD country so to manufacture anything here costs easily 4 or more times as much as their parent company operations in Asia, America or Europe.
It was inevitable that this would happen an they were stuck in the old times saying people wanted big family cars when people were realising a mazda 3/golf will fit their 2 kids just as well and save on fuel/insurance/rego.
Then there is the money they poured into the v8 supercars series which was a massive waste.


Re: Livestock grazing, i am happy for people to do it here but not if they are going to complain they live on a farm in the middle of nowhere and expect my taxes to pay for electricity and water infrastructure for them, flood/drought assistance and recently the allowance into national parks in QLD.
Sure mining companies operate out there but they actually pay upfront for the infrastructure to be delivered and don't get the subsidies that farmers do.
They need to be self sufficient and innovative to move with the times and if not then we shouldn't be supporting them as it is just throwing money into a bottomless pit.

Vetical farming is taking off overseas and is the way of the future, it allows for less water/space/energy usage.
While we do have a lot of land here, about 60% of it is too dry to do anything with so if people want to farm it they can, just so long as they don't complain when they have to fund their own infrastructure.


What this comes down to is the Government failing to push research in areas where we can be competitive, instead of throwing money at industries who complained they weren't pro-active and are now on a slippery slope towards their inevitable end.

Sorry for getting stuck on this, but it's a bit of a sore spot for me.
I know plenty of farmers who are trying to be "proactive". Some have become certified organic, to accept a lower yield for higher grain prices using no chemicals etc, and some go the other direction and switch to GM crops for higher yields. This causes issues for their organic neighbours when a small GM contamination makes their whole crop worthless. (Different discussion again...)

Just keep in mind that if farmers go bust (and where I grew up too many families of many farming generations have called it quits this last decade), then the towns that support them go bust too. Like it or not, the ONLY reason for most country towns to exist, is that they are supporting the local farmers and their families. You are talking about shutting down the whole country outside of the major cities.
I'll try to leave this alone now...

[Greg Roles]

At least I had the experience of a nice new BA GT off the line, a childhood dream fulfilled.