I am sick of hearing the idiot argument that high worker wages was the cause of the demise of car manufacture in Australia.
World leading car manufacturing jurisdictions such as Japan, Korea or Germany have assembly worker wage costs equal to or
greater than Australia (Chinese vehicles that have el-cheapo labour costs are not much cop for our market yet).
In addition, Aussie manufactured vehicles had about $2K benefit over exports due to imports' shipping & wharfage costs x 2.
The truth of the matter is that Australians wanted different cars than those produced locally and one has to only look at the
growth of market share by Hyundai-Kia & Mazda which coincided with the loss of market share by our local producers.
Holden was too little/too late with its second class Cruze.
Add to that the economy of scale. Its a no brainer to work out the amortised unit cost(without assembly labour cost) of a car being produced at 50K units a year versus that of a car being produced at 500k units a year. As a variation on Bill Clinton's maxim:
"Its about the economy of scale, stupid". This is why the locals pulled up stumps because the current models had reached their use by dates.
Perhaps there could have been room for one manufacturer manufacturing a compact model and complementing production numbers by exporting to our FTA partners of which Uncle Sam is one.
Once corporate welfare dried up during the Abbott regime, it was lights out for local manufacturing.
All we need now is to be allowed to import good cheap low klm used cars from Japan thereby allowing Aussie workers an opportunity to benefit from the Australia-Japan FTA given that we now dont have a local manufacturing industry to protect !
