Psyber wrote:There is an inexorable process under way.
GM will close anyway in a few years after the Aussie taxpayer has been milked for a little longer.
All Australian manufacturing will fold in time without tariff barriers, which a re now un-PC and impossible to reintroduce anyway.
(They would increase the price of goods and get the government that reintroduces them thrown out.)
This is the legacy of the Hawke/Keating government that started the process to artificially lower the CPI and maintain the "Accord" with the Unions.
All manufacturing will inevitably move to lower cost environments.
Eventually some one will undercut the Chinese as their standard of living rises - as happened to Japan.
Which could well be Australia.
I was the last production supervisor at a factory in edwardstown that made clotheslines etc and all the manufacturing is now done in China . In the last 10 years wages in China have gone up about 500%, (from a very low base)they are nowhere near ours but as an example, to make a trampoline at edwardstown we had 9 guys on the line, the chinese had nearly 60. The collective wage bill for that product became pretty close to ours and then you factor in the logistics cost.
With the chinese now having something resembling a middle class, wages will continue to rise and as my former employers are finding out they couldmake some of their products cheaper here than they can in China and they would love to manufacture here again. And Hills aren't the only ones
Only problem with that is, like most other com panies that have gone off shore, they have sold land, plant and equipment so the set up costs would be astronomical. Pretty sure that when Hills bought their edwardstown sight in 1948 it didn't cost them 23 million. Once its gone folks it's not coming back
I think Holden want to stay here because they can see things going full circle they just need some coin to ride out this storm, and what they are after seems a reasonable request for infrastructure upgrades then fair enough IMO, with the caveat that it is not a bottomless pit of money and their is full public disclosure