Driving down a dead end
Holden was always going to lose the global race for car buyers
nessman— gave me a tour of his textile factory which made jeans for Polo-Ralph Lauren. At the end I told him how impressed I was with the operation. ‘‘It will be closed within two years,’’ he said. ‘‘We can’t compete with bloody China.’’
If Mexico can’t compete with China then Elizabeth, South Australia, and Fisherman’s Bend, Victoria, have got a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with China.
Throw in a surging Aussie dollar clobbering exports, and the comparatively low number of car purchases in Australia, and you have got what Mike Devereux rightly described as a perfect storm.
The political heat around the issue this week has largely been confected nonsense. It has also been time-wasting nonsense, as there is little point dwelling on what might have been given the utterly irreversible nature of Holden’s decision, and more value in concentrating on how to create meaningful paths to employment for the near-3000 people facing the sack in four year’s time, and more importantly the thousands more in small allied businesses who might lose their jobs well before 2017 as their little operations wind down ahead of Holden (and Toyota’s?) exit.
Labor has been going as hard as it can to paint the Liberals as the architects of Holden’s demise. The Liberals have given them plenty of ammo with their completely weird dealings with Holden, where the moment it became apparent that the company had one foot in the grave, a slew of conservatives lined up to push it into the hole.
Holden was treated badly at the end by this confusing government, which on the one hand told Holden to cooperate with the Productivity Commission inquiry which doesn’t report until next year, then started shouting at the company to make up its mind right now as to whether it was staying or not.
The Coalition were not the architects of Holden’s demise but they certainly presided over its execution. That execution was, however, inevitable, for all the factors mentioned above. Even if Tony Abbott had stumped up for the extra cash, Holden would have still gone the way of Ford and Mitsubishi.
Labor premiers such as SA’s Jay Weatherill and his predecessor Mike Rann, and Julia Gillard herself, have collected a series of deceptive ‘‘JOBS SAVED’’ front pages by chucking money at the automotive sector, which did nothing to stop redundancies, achieved negligible increases in exports, did little to boost market share.
THE other weakness in Labor’s claim for moral supremacy is that its last contribution to the car industry while in government was to belt it with an economi- cally absurd attack on fringe benefits tax, which killed new car sales dead.
The unions and compliant Holden management also played a role.
It’s a pity that the push for greater flexibility brokered between Devereux and the Vehicle Builders Union boss John Camillo started 10 weeks ago, not 10 years ago. It was like a bit like waiting until you hit 150kg before buying a rowing machine.
Given all of these factors there is little point being angry about what has happened. It was the most unstoppable thing in the world.
The one feature of the debate which angers me is the callousness of some of its participants.
There are those who are in total denial about the human cost of these manufacturing upheavals, and others who perversely regard it as some kind of thrilling economic demonstration of Darwin’s survival of the fittest.
The reality is that we have to adjust and change as a nation. But we also have to do a much better job at addressing the human impact, and making sure that people aren’t left behind, that they are properly retrained, that new businesses are supported, and the displaced workers are pointed in the direction of those new jobs.
There was a telling moment in the recent ABC interview series with former prime minister Paul Keating which underscored the gulf between economic theory and reality.
Asked by Kerry O’Brien about the joblessness caused by the free trade agenda, Keating snapped back: ‘‘Yep and they all got better jobs.’’
It’s simply not true. Some of them did. Heaps didn’t. The former PM should read the Flinders University study on the fate of the former Mitsubishi workers.
One-third of them got jobs with equal or better pay, onethird are working as casuals or part-time, and one-third are on the dole or the disability support pension.
If you are going to subscribe to the trickle- down theory you have an obligation to make sure the trickling actually works.
Personally, I would love to see someone in a position of power make this argument not while sitting in a roomful of priceless antiques finessing their legend, and not over Peronis at Menzies House with their chums from the Young Liberal movement, but in the front bar of the Castle Plaza Tavern, where blokes who used to work at Mitsubishi and now don’t work at all, drink to forget.