The Enemy Are Coming, Quick Get Into the Holden

In industrial news today (well it was today when I first wrote this, its about a week ago now) Holden is planning to get rid of four hundred employees.  This means they will probably be ditching up to a dozen actual workers.  This news has generated the usual howls from the usual people.  Actually there have been howls or at least comments from pretty much everyone.  This is hardly surprising when one considers the level of government support the Australian car industry receives.  In fact one wonders whether the Australian car industry could best be described as a rather expensive work for the dole program.

For some reason a car industry is like farming.  It is one of those things that everybody seems to agree we have to have whether it is profitable or not.  It is apparently part of our national identity or some such.What this essentially means is that tax money is provided to the Australian subsidiaries of foreign owned car companies to persuade them to inefficiently build a small number of cars that nobody particularly wants.  Try applying for a business loan on those criteria and see how far you get.

Another reason put forward for keeping our car lack of industry is strategic.  Without a car industry we will apparently be helpless before the serried ranks of invaders waiting just offshore for us to shut down the last Ford and Holden plants.  It would appear that if Australia is invaded our counter attack will be spearheaded by commcars and taxis.  All right I do know that such people are referring to possessing a heavy industrial base generally rather than hurling commodores into the teeth of the enemy but this doesn't make their argument any less silly.  Here are a few other things we don't manufacture that might have some strategic importance; tanks, artillery, high performance jets, low performance jets, no performance jets, ammunition for any of the preceding.  In point of fact the last time Australia supplied all of its military requirements from its own resources was before white settlement.  We should check to see how that worked out.

So what to do about our car industry?  There are two different options really.  The first is the simplest and the best.  Cut off all subsidies and wish it bon voyage.  If it survives it will have deserved to and we will have a car industry we can be genuinely proud of, if not then I guess we're going to have to rely on our friends and allies to supply us cars should we be invaded, always assuming its not them doing the invading.  The other option is to nationalise the industry.  Because let's face it if the tax payer really is going to have to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars so that an inefficient, badly run, over unionised basket case of an industry can survive then it seems only fair that they actually own the damn thing.