I guess that argument assumes that a Buddist society with limited trade is less tollerant than a highly capitalistic one. You know, a benign, peacefull trading state like the US.

Trade is a utilarian matter - nothing more.

I’m so glad we’ll be free to sell other things when the boom winds down. Now exactly what other things would those be - we don’t make things anymore, because it was cheaper to import them, remember?

Most people don’t realise that world trade, as a proportion of world output, reached a zenith in the belle époque just prior to WW1 which was not approached again until the 1980s. It’s no coincidence that the Long Boom (1946-1972) “coincided” with a massive recovery in trade.

Yep, if you make a motza selling rocks you suddenly get poorer when people want fewer rocks (though that’s not so different from cars - have you noticed the US carmakers’ troubles when people wanted fewer gas guzzlers?). But if you’re sensible you’ve still got some of the motza you made when the price was high (Norway’s oil fund is the best example of such sense), and you’re now free to sell other things. But do you really believe that, when this commodity cycle cools, those “other things” foreigners want will be our cars?

As to the stragtegic need for manufacturing industry, I spent 26 years (some of it part time) as a soldier, so it kind of colours my thinking. I hope we never need it for war, but considering our isolation from the rest of the world, we could be in a world of hurt without manufacturing capability.

I am pleased to see that you are aware of concepts such as strategic reasons (including economic strategy).

So many points to argue here.

The argument that our manufacturers make crap cars is, well….crap. My car is one of the last of it’s kind to have been made here. It is an EXCELLENT car - 10 years running, including 4 trips halfway round Australia and back without a SINGLE hiccup - not even a minor one. It’s one single problem is that it could do with being a little bit more fuel efficient.

Shouldn’t it be obvious that you can be very good at something and still get the hell kicked out of you in a no-holds-barred contest. What result would you get from putting the Olympic wrestling gold medalist in a cage with an adult male gorilla? Would the wrestler now be regarded as crap at wrestling because he got killed by a monster?

I don’t know - I suppose after a long period of prosperity and peace (relatively speaking) people have difficulty coming to grips with concepts such as long term security and the need for some self-reliance capabilities.

Fuck ‘em! They don’t deserve to stay in business.

See that! Now you’re starting to catch on. But back to that later.

First you said that the most damaging economic effect of WW1 was the destruction of world trade, but straight after that you said: “in the long run, trade is also associated with tollerance and intellectual curiosity too”.

Going on what you’re saying, the world reached a high point in TOLLERANCE and intellectual curiosity in (and because of) the last free trade period - and then trading partener turned on trading partener in one of the bloodiest wars in modern history. So much for trade leading to tollerance and intellectual curiosity. Why did you make two such contradictory statements back to back?

I am not opposed to trade of course - just to allowing the destruction of valuable local industries that provide large numbers of skilled jobs for the sake of ever cheaper consumer goods. The more of these we let die, the more we come to rely on recieving a good price for exporting ever larger volumes of rocks - forever.

I was here in this resource town the last time the value of our rocks collapsed and it wasn’t pretty. If all of our needs are imported and paid for by a very small number of export industries, then we are treading thin ice.

cont later

DD, I wasn’t saying that our auto industry was still in it’s infancy, that was a seperate point.

I am merely arguing the case for some measure of protection for valuable local industries where reducing tariffs and other protective measures to zero leaves them hopelessly outgunned by competing economies of scale with access to very cheap labour and an exchange rate that favours their wares over ours.

All we are doing is perpetually increasing our reliance on offshore production. Jobs in the service industries may be a good thing, but they cannot replace what we have lost. By that I mean that we are no less dependent on say, farm machinery today then when we manufactured a reasonable proportion of our own. The biggest change is that we have simply become completely dependent on producers on the other side of the world for these very important pieces of equipment.

Cont’ later

Watching and reading all of these financial gurus talking about welfare for the manufacturing sector while the financial institutions they work for cream billions a year off a compulsory super scheme, seems a little hypocritical to me. The subsidies that the car makers will receive in the next 10-15 years will be about what the financial institutions will make in one year from managing our super. I’d rather that the government just paid them 2.4 billion straight up to manage our money.

But you can’t credibly argue that for the Oz car industry - it’s been an “infant industry” since 1948!

PDAA, don’t get me onto the iniquities of superannuation - I’ll bore you shitless on it if you let me, as I did to people on this thread. Suffice to say it’s anything but a free or efficient market.

The trouble the Australian makers have is that the whole niche they found to keep in business - large, relatively cheap sedans - is relatively unique; nobody else except the USA (whose large sedans are mostly crud) and the Middle Eastern countries buy them in quantity. That’s how the car makers could remain (mostly) profitable churning out boutique quantities of cars by world standards.

The thing is, the Australian market has shifted towards cars that the rest of the world produces - four-wheel-drives, small to medium cars, and to some extent “prestige” cars (BMW sells ridiculously large numbers of its smaller cars here). As the Bracks report says, to be competitive in the small-to-medium segment, you need to churn out 300-400,000 cars per year from your plant.

Ford is going to begin assembling a small car - the Focus - out at Broadmeadows in a couple of years time. We’ll get to test DD’s hypothesis to some extent.

If Chifley had been a real visionary when it came to the car industry, Australia’s own car would have been the equivalent of a Mercedes, Porsche, or Land Rover, not a Holden. We might have been able to compete globally in niche markets.

See, that’s the part I find strange - an industry that has been operating here for 40 odd years and knows the local market better than anyone else simply refuses to make the cars that it KNOWS people want to buy….apparently. They could significantly increase their market share and profitibility, yet they just choose not to…..apparently.

Are we to take it that our manufacturers are clever enough to know how to make make big cars but too dumb to know how to make smaller, more fuel efficient (and possibly somewhat cheaper to build) cars that the public demand?

Or could it be that tariffs have come down so far already that they simply consider it unviable to try and compete with small cars that cost foreign manufacturers less to export to Australia and have a higher turnover?

Incidently, some of those manufacuring nations maintain auto tariffs of 30%+. They have also been some of the fastest growing manufacturing economies in the world in the world, despite a moderate tariff wall. Or perhaps it is because of it - they would have been unlikely to have gotten very far as they began to tread on toes in powerful developed economies without some form of protection for fledgling industries.

LOLZ.

Rick Farley was a bit more nuanced, but that’s a pretty fair summary.