And then there were none .

[GSRman]

It will be interesting to see if the toyota plant is decommissioned - or mothballed.

[Fraud]

If anything you'd think we might be able to have a future in designing and developing cars for manufacture elsewhere; that seems to be the Ford Australia strategy from here on in.

several manufacturers have been doing this for a while, and honestly, I suspect that money gifted to these manufacturers has probably been diverted to these R&D teams which would ultimately be a more beneficial use of the money than keeping a loss making plant open... I'd almost expect that they've kept hte plants open as a front to keep the injection into their R&D...

Toyota develops cars here that aren't sold here, I'd say that any changes made to the new Cruze etc. by GM have been largely driven by R&D in australia, wasn't the new camaro largely developed/designed here? I read an interview with one of the guys in Toyota's 4wd engineering team about the Fortuner (think of a hilux station wagon) and a few others not sold here, but they do get developed and tested here because except for extreme cold, just about every terrain, climate and condition can be tested here...

[kabab]

Think of it like this when the Australian automotive industry was doing well our economy was very different..

The Aussie dollar was like what 50c - 60c our property prices where very affordable so the wages didn't need to explode so people could just live..

Australia was a well educated western country with decent work ethic, business environment, stability and regulation with low costs pretty much the dream for any company looking to lower costs by off shoring....

Now we are a fucken expensive country with a really strong $$$... why would anyone want to setup shop here?

I'd like to see our government try and restructure our economy so we become a cheap nation again bring the $$ down, reduce the cost of living so we can start building shit again and exporting..

[Captiva Fan]

Think of it like this when the Australian automotive industry was doing well our economy was very different..

The Aussie dollar was like what 50c - 60c our property prices where very affordable so the wages didn't need to explode so people could just live..

Woah, wait a sec on that one ... property prices have never been good here, I was moaning about it when starting to look in the mid 90's & my parents said something along the lines of "suck it up whiny-boy, it was no different for us in the late 60's, and your grandparents as well".

You're right about the regulation thing, my FIL moved her from Germany in 1980 because he was sick of the legislative red-tape there - unfortunately, we've caught-up.

I'd like to see our government try and restructure our economy so we become a cheap nation again bring the $$ down, reduce the cost of living so we can start building shit again and exporting..

Doesn't "reduce the cost of living" go hand-in-hand with "reduce the standard of living"?
Not sniping, it's a genuine question - because I thought it does?

[itsnotagsr]

No one seems to have mentioned the inescapable fact that people just don't seem to buy falcadorys. Everyone who previously bought one, wants a 4wd or Golf it seems. Therefore as a company, you either need to export or make something people will buy. The Territory was an honest effort. However its been let down by build quality, initial lack of diesel and woeful dealership experience. Add to that the parent didn't want to look for export markets.

[kabab]

Woah, wait a sec on that one ... property prices have never been good here, I was moaning about it when starting to look in the mid 90's & my parents said something along the lines of "suck it up whiny-boy, it was no different for us in the late 60's, and your grandparents as well".

No the price of housing has exploded which has made everything more expensive a long with it... In the 80's-90's the average cost of a house was about 4x the annual salary now its around 8-10x which is a huge increase particularly when you take into account Australia has nothing but space...

Doesn't "reduce the cost of living" go hand-in-hand with "reduce the standard of living"?
Not sniping, it's a genuine question - because I thought it does?

Well depends how you look at it..

If you have a strong $$ you can import stuff cheaply from other countries so it means your $1 goes really far so you don't have generate as much money to get more "stuff"...

As a nation we are very lucky we have everything we need we really don't need to import any core essential resources to have a good life... We have an abundance of energy, water, food, raw resources, space.. If we didn't have these things and had a weak $$ we would be fucked like many of the African nations since we wouldn't have the wealth to import the resources we had a shortage of.

So having a low $$ will mean luxury shit will become more expensive TV's, cars, phones, computers going holidays etc but those things are luxuries... But on the flip side the actual stuff you need to live would be cheaper and it would be easier to export so there should be more industries and jobs...

But hey this is just my theory feel free to rip it apart

[TonyJZX]

thing is with expensive cars and tvs and phones and shit... how often do you, or should you buy that stuff?

it could be argued having expensive consumer durables is a better deal than having expensive utilities and food and rent and all the ongoings

we have... no lie, half a dozen CRT tvs waiting to be chucked out, half a dozen LCD tvs in use and half a dozen LCD monitors and half a dozen laptops... i'm pretty sure most people would give all that up to have affordable electricity rent council rates morgage food and all the shit that needs to be paid regularly

[TonyJZX]

thing is with expensive cars and tvs and phones and shit... how often do you, or should you buy that stuff?

it could be argued havent expensive consumer durables is a better deal than having expensive utilities and food and rent and all the ongoings

we have... no lie, half a dozen CRT tvs waiting to be chucked out, half a dozen LCD tvs in use and half a dozen LCD monitors and half a dozen laptops... i'm pretty sure most people would give all that up to have affordable electricity rent council rates morgage food and all the shit that needs to be paid regularly

[Captiva Fan]

Just thinking about what gets imported as opposed to local.
Clothing is one, that'd go up.
Fuel would go up, we do way too much transport so that means even though we make food here that will go up quite a lot. The cost of all these utilities that've gone-up recently; that's a recent thing, and there's been no bubble in the last 3 years in wages, so that's not going to be particularly wage-related; eg. maintenance of stuff no-doubt involves buying-in from overseas.

But on the other side of all of that, if the price of your kid's undies does triple, that might mean you'd get Bonds considering building them here again.

On balance, I think you're right. Short-term pain would be longer-term gain overall. Although I don't know if I'm convinced that housing would necessarily drop that much, and that's a biggie in the places people actually want to live ... you'd have to put a plug in investment by non-citizens or something like that. And everyone with a mortgage would get kicked firmly in the financial 'nads.

*edit*
One possibly-interesting thing I found, when just having a look around for numbers on income vs houses vs time, is on Wikipedia here. It says Sydney property has only increased ~17% in the last 10 years where every other capital has doubled. It does make you wonder whether that means everything will stabilise; did Sydney stabilise a bit because it finally hit that saturation value where everyone's just said "enough - I can't afford that"? Or did foreign investors start buying elsewhere maybe?

[Captain_Slow]

The comment I heard was he said "While I'm alive we'll continue to make cars in Australia". Has one of their former presidents died recently?:D

Yes. Eiji Toyoda, who witnessed the first Tiara come off the production line in Australia in 1963 and laid the foundation stone at the Altona plant, died last September (according to GoAuto News today). Apparently he felt a strong connection to Australia as the first country where Toyota successfully manufactured outside of Japan.

[Captain_Slow]

Just thinking about this some more, I find the Toyota decision the most puzzling and even the company's own comments today say the decision was "close". We'll probably never know but I'd be really interested to know what the factors were that they took into account and how the numbers looked; Toyota doesn't strike me as a company that would close a plant lightly, unlike Ford and GM.

Perhaps though it was just the writing on the wall - costs weren't going to get much better, imports were going to continue to be cheaper, and the Productivity Commission just last week recommended that the Govt not provide any car industry funding at all from 2020 onwards.

It will be really interesting to see what happens if/when the dollar gets back down to 70c or even 50c and imported cars suddenly become very expensive.

[Falc&Send]

thing is with expensive cars and tvs and phones and shit... how often do you, or should you buy that stuff?

Back in the "old days" people only bought a new item (generally) when the old one fucked up. Now everybody (generally) wants the latest and greatest widget, just because, even though their current/older widget is performing fine.

[Mini]

Germany has 80m people and England has 60m. Both are export orientated in the manufacturing base. Australia also needs to do this.

John Howard the hero of many here was adamant that Australia had to get out of manufacturing and become a service based country. I guess the liberals still think that way and are carrying on with the mission as he planned.

[Mini]

So it wasn't entirely the union or workers fault.....

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...212-32h1u.html

[KanaL]

Back in the "old days" people only bought a new item (generally) when the old one fucked up. Now everybody (generally) wants the latest and greatest widget, just because, even though their current/older widget is performing fine.

however a lot of the time "these days" the latest and greatest widget is built like shit and will happily fuck out after a year or two.