For a couple of years I worked at Ford In Broadmeadows,...

For a couple of years I worked at Ford In Broadmeadows, Melbourne as a Robotics/PLC technician on production support.
I also looked after the electrical install on a few line relocations & reconfigurations - when a new model came out we would re-use many of the same robots & loading stations to suit the new body side, door, hood, tail gate which our shop manufactured. Back then the ute body side line was running at full capacity, night & day. Aussies love their utes.
I can remember one of those years there was a big celebration to commemorate Ford's 75th year manufacturing cars in Australia.
Also that we were pretty good at it. In fact of countries with the capacity to design a new model from scratch, both Ford & Holden had teams of extremely capable people right across the disciplines. My recollection was that only 13 countries had the skill base capable of doing this, built up over 75 years - there were internal, niche TAFE & uni partnerships with the auto industry where specialized skills were taught by educators who'd spent years training people from Melbourne's auto industry.
And it paid enough to give people a decent life - I'd come from a power station, then construction, then commissioning background so it wasn't as lucrative as that, however living in a decent home & raising 2.3 kids wasn't out of an average auto industry worker's budget. And manufacturing was 3 shifts a day, 5 days a week, so work/life balance was baked into the job.

I left Ford after a couple of years, can't remember which project got me away, but construction/commissioning for some gets in your blood & so the reason for leaving would have been easily justified on those grounds. Of all the things which happened in the years following, the dissolution of the auto industry was probably one of the worst self owns I've ever seen any government deliberately engineer, anywhere. I know for a fact that those people I worked with at Ford, who made it possible to manufacture brand new models of cars out of 10-15 year old robotic & PLC lines would have led the field with their knowledge & expertise transitioning to EVs & batteries. There are people I worked with to this day I still think about at just how good they were at what they did - the tool & die makers who could 'see' a defect in the skin of a door or hood & by feel know exactly what to do to that die to fix that defect. Or the Robotics technician who'd stand there watching the cycle of a TIG welder for 4 or 5 shifts of 8 hours & hundreds if not thousands of cycles to improve the angle, feed, speed & quality of a seam weld. Skills you are never going to replicate with any Chat GPT AI.

It genuinely did my head in when the newspapers & our political leaders, well one side in particular, demonized the industry as vociferously as they did. Not that I lost my job as I'd moved on by this stage, but this capability, the skill sets, training instutiions (all those niche courses) & overall competitiveness in complex areas where we held our own, out the door, on the scrap heap, irreplaceable.
The claim that the industry was 'costing' taxpayers $200M a year was the justification the government put forward to throw the baby out with the bath water, to dare the big car makers to p!ss off. Mind you that $200M a year was on the proviso jobs stayed in Australia & a lot of this went to designing new models in Australia, with Australian workers educated by Australian TAFEs & universities.

In years to follow the same government committed $200 Billion to buying submarines - or 1,000 years of auto industry 'subsidies'.
Not to mention the debt they ran up with not a hell of a lot to show for the almost $1 Trillion.

So to Albo, hats off mate. This is a welcome development.
And maybe somewhere, somehow, TIVAN plays a not insignificant role in value adding, making stuff here again.