Australian Made but who receives Government Aid?

24 July 2009

If only our industry produced cars and not coal. With each automotive job now costing the tax payer more than $120,000 a year, mining towns which are currently shedding hundreds of jobs such as Kambalda are entitled to ask where their bailout is. Why do we favour manufacturing industries which cannot turn a profit even in good times over historically profitable resources projects?

Our industry employees hundreds of thousands, generates a vast majority of the nation's export wealth and props up government spending with the billions in royalties it pays every year. With all this good will in the bank, you would figure the resources industry would receive a helping hand if the government planned to prop up businesses. Maybe the goodwill bank could receive some kind of government guarantee? Alas however goodwill means little when it comes to being re-elected and the generous hand of Canberra does not see political value in such a profitable industry, so it has been left on the shelf along with towns such as Kambalda.

Why Australians make cars is beyond me. Obviously there are votes in it but really. Ford and GM cannot even survive in the American market without significant government aid so how they will ever survive in Australia on their own makes no sense. Do we just prop them up forever? Why? What is so critical to the national interest that we make overpriced, inferior cars?* Maybe it is so they match our overpriced and inferior - though Australian made - politicians, who of course purchase local cars. It is far more efficient to have auto workers on welfare, completing volunteer work, starting a small business or going back to study, then making cars which the Europeans and Japanese are so much better at.

And so we reach the ultimate irony in all of this, where the taxes and royalties of the companies still afloat in Kambalda are being used to keep jobs in Adelaide and Altona. Our industry really needs greater access to the halls of power within Australia. Maybe driving up them in something Australian made is the way to do it.

* I usually try to refrain from using a large number of rhetorical questions when presenting arguments, however I have made an exception in this entry as I am at a loss to explain the answers to these questions, though would love to know what they are. If you know the real answers please email me.