There was a thread on here a few weeks back, with many posters lamenting the ongoing Govt assistance being given to Ford, Toyota and Holden in order to maintain car manufacturing in Australia, with many posters pointing to countries like Germany as a good example of a place where the auto industry stands on its own, without the need for Govt assistance.

Well, surprise surprise, seems the German auto industry isn't quite so self-supporting as one may have been lead to believe. In 2008-09, they received almost 20 times more assistance from the German Govt than the Australian manufacturers received from ours.

According to a report by Sapere Research, the comparitive per-capita assistance for 2008/09 for some assorted vehicle manufacturing countries was: (All in ppp$USD)

Australia $17.80 (Total A$573 million)
UK: $27.99
Germany: $90.37 (Total €8.6 billion or ~A$16 billion in 2008)
Canada: $96.39
France: $147.38
USA: $264.82
Sweden: $334.18
Graph: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/xgrkv
Report: http://www.fcai.com.au/library/publication//fcai_report.pdf

The Govts of Germany and France have apparently decided that throwing big money at the auto industry is a worthwhile investment, and Automotive manufacturing in both of of these countries (despite high wage costs) have moved ahead in leaps and bounds in recent years. Should we do the same?

Personally I would be happy for assistance to increase, but the condition must be that the manufacturers should guarantee to develop export markets for the vehicles produced here. Simply maintaining local production for the local market is not (IMHO) sustainable or sensible in the long term.

But there's no reason why we can't export our vehicles on a larger scale. On a value-for-money basis the Falcon/Commodore/Territory are very competitive on the World stage. Toyota already export the vast majority of their Australian production. Ford (and to a lesser extent, GM) are reluctant though because they don't want to cannibalise manufacturing in their other countries. Maybe adding some suitable conditions to assistance would overcome that problem. No export focus = No dollars.