What sort of country are we if we can’t build cars?
So I’m no stranger to the formulaic wailing that has followed the closure of each successive Australian car manufacturing facility: What sort of country are we if we can’t build cars?
For a good deal of my working career, delaying inevitable industrial closures was part of my bread and butter. For decades I worked in the New South Wales (NSW) Government department responsible, variously for: Industrial Development, Regional Development, Business Development, Decentralisation and so on.
One of my first assignments was to assist in preventing the complete cessation of shipbuilding in Newcastle where once quite large ships were built and launched into the harbour, in full view of the city centre. We managed to keep the dockyard limping along, building ferries for Sydney Harbour, before its inevitable demise. Soon afterward I was involved in unsuccessfully attempting to save a tile factory in Lithgow where a large Small Arms Factory making rifles for the Army, was also on taxpayer life support.
Dozens of regional manufacturing closures followed. Like Australasian Training Aids in Albury not far from BorgWarner, a manufacturer of automotive transmissions, that was also in a lifelong struggle with the grim reaper, before the scythe finally did its work. At Email, in Orange, it was alarming to notice that taxpayer assistance often exceeded the company’s annual profit. The money went directly from the taxpayer to the shareholder's pockets. The plant was taken-over by Electrolux at the turn of the century and has continued to struggle for survival. It is to shut its doors, finally, in 2016.
While city businesses were generally allowed to rise and fall without government interference, we got concerned when they had potential electoral impact. Thus we became particularly distressed by a succession of large NSW automotive plant closures, involving many thousands of workers, including: British Leyland at Zetland in 1974; Holden at Pagewood in 1981; and Ford at Homebush in 1994.
At one stage the NSW Government bought a fleet of locally built Ford Lasers in an attempt to delay the final closure. One got vandalised outside my house, a dangerous place for cars.
Because labour productivity is much higher today with automation, automotive workforces have shrunk while the economy at large has more than doubled in size. The employment impact of each of the NSW automotive closures was thus considerably greater last century than those now foreshadowed in Victoria and South Australia.