There are calls from many quarters for keeping Australia's car industry alive. I am not so sure that a country needs its own motor industry anymore. Times have changed. No vehicle is made entirely in one country today. The days of getting prestige from it are long gone.
Propping up a floundering car sector is against all practical economic and social theory. It doesn't make sense to spend taxpayers money in such a wasteful way. Holden and Ford continue to take handouts while still not making any profit. Ford has already gone. The days for Holden are numbered. Holden was never a truly Australian car. It was an old General Motors design left in a drawer collecting dust until it was thrown on the table at a meeting in Australia.
Australia has never been a manufacturing country. It is not like Britain which has very in the way of natural resources so must generate income somehow from industry. Large businesses have only been in the primary sector. Exporting what comes out of the ground has always been the way Australia survives.
Those who hang on to so called Australian icons are sentimentalists. Things do change and old things fall away. Vegemite and Billy Tea are foreign owned. This doesn't stop us from claiming these icons. If Holden dies in this country that will be it. The car is not composed completely of Australian parts anyway. We can always rebadge an American designed car and race it at Bathurst.
Economics by Ty Buchanan
