Parallel Imports

No chance of manufacturing ever getting going again in this country. Too many imports is what killed off our car industry. We export all our steel and import it back as a car.....
 
Tariffs. Protection. Subsidies.

The oil crisis, import penetration despite tariff protection and poor productivity was the beginning of the downward spiral in the 80's and it was industry protection and government subsidies which saw maunfacturing continue until that was removed and thats was the death knell of the industry.

The local car industry was slow on the uptake in producing models that the masses were buying, small cheap economical shitboxes from O/S, no one wanted large sedans with large sixes or eights given the high cost of fuel.

Once the subsidies were removed there is no way that the local industry could compete with the cheap labour rates form asia, mexico etc and the manufacturers now produce OS and we import.

I agree manufacturing is dead here as we cant compete with cheap overseas labour.

The only thing that parrallel imports may do is reduce the cost of some models both car and bikes but that will depend on the uptake
 
Once the subsidies were removed there is no way that the local industry could compete with the cheap labour rates form asia, mexico etc and the manufacturers now produce OS and we import.
While you are right about locals continuing to make models that were no longer in the popular classes, you might be surprised how little the Australian labour costs affected things. We still get a lot of cars from countries with high labour costs such as Germany, Japan, Britain and the USA and they have the disadvantage of shipping costs on top. Thailand is now where we source most of our small cars and trade utes because most of the world gave countries like Thailand incredible trade concessions because they are "developing" nations. Similarly, most small bikes and a lot of computer hardware now come from Thailand.

Ford head office wouldn't let Ford Aust produce cars for export which severely limited the scale of production. Exports have really help GM-H and Toyota Aus. GM Australia was still profitable when the rest of GM around the world was running at a loss.
 
GM was profitable with government subsidies, once withdrawn so did GM

As are nearly every other car manufacturers around the world. Huge subsidies in US, Germany, Japan, Korea, France the list goes on. For some reason Australia could not do the same. We are doing the same thing to our farmers. What will we eat when they go broke?
 
As are nearly every other car manufacturers around the world. Huge subsidies in US, Germany, Japan, Korea, France the list goes on. For some reason Australia could not do the same. We are doing the same thing to our farmers. What will we eat when they go broke?

We'll buy everything from china at over inflated prices when all the land has been sold off to chinese interests.

Australian land should be on a lease arrangement only.
 
The problem I have with this is the produce must be sold to the highest bidder. A farm owned by a Chinese government should have to put the produce on the open market. Not just send it directly to China. If this does not happen we are FFFFd!
 
Time to become self sufficient and start growing your own veggies, anyway am very wary of buying any produce that is made in china/asia given that there health standards imo are dubious at best or from NZ, the backdoor into australia.
 
This is a very interesting thread for a non-Australian. How much of your goods are imported in Australia? I get the impression that it's quite a lot
 
How about food? How much has to come in? It would seem to me that Australia has the space & the climate to grow everything imaginable. We import a lot of our food from Mexico, California and increasingly from China as well. There's a fair bit that can grow here but it's very seasonal, unlike places like Mexico & California.
 
About 1/3 of all the fruit and 20% of all vegetables come from OS and is increasing all to do with cost and profits of the two arge duopolies. Their own brand labels are generally cheaper, the source of origin not australian is generally cheaper

Citrus growers for example dump their fruit because they cant sell it yet the supermarkets fill their shelves with imported crud. Nothing like profits before people

The major source is new zealand ( backdoor for chinese products) then from the states,malaysia and sinapore.

The FTA's have made it easier as well
 
Dustin, the first thing to remember; Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. It is also the oldest continent with no active volcanoes or continental plates creating or replenishing land areas. Australia has a lot of space but because most of it is desert, it isn't as productive as you might think. The soil in a lot of those areas was badly depleted even before humans arrived due to the age of the country and the climate. Low density beef cattle farming is done in some of those areas but not crop farming. Those same areas also have some of the lowest human population densities on earth. In Canada you have large parts of the country under snow for months of the year but when it melts you have abundant water. Below is a map with average Australian rainfalls. The Northern part of the country gets most of its rain from a couple of Cyclones/Monsoons per year but for 6 to 8 months they will get no rain. Some areas can go years without rain.
GA14206.jpg

The second thing to remember: We are an island a long way from rest of the world and bulk goods can only get here by sea. When transportation of goods was slow and expensive, we had to be self-sufficient and did have a reputation as good small-to-mid scale manufacturer up until very recently. Ships got bigger and faster, containerisation revolutionised shipping, crews got smaller and are cheaper from less developed countries so unit costs for importing goods plummeted.

Third: Australia has huge mineral reserves that are on or close to the surface and fairly easy to exploit. Business and government decided digging up and exporting (remember cheaper shipping) such commodities was more beneficial than the hard work of making thing from those minerals. One of our other big exports is education. We have a world class education and university system which means we have an abundance of highly educated people who don't really want to be stuck out in the country digging up dirt but we will happily educate people from overseas in how to do it. As a nation, we've been good at inventing things but we'd now prefer people overseas to make them for us.

We have been doing stupid things like building huge open cut coal mines on some of our best farming land. We have some of the biggest coal reserves in the world and are one of the top 5 coal exporters (Japan and China are the main markets). The huge drop in coal prices and developments in renewable energy are slowly turning the tide against coal mining, especially for electricity production. We've been selling prime farming land to foreigners for a long time but it has gotten worse in the recent years as Chinese companies have come in to produce food for their growing home market. The Chinese and Indians have also been buying in to a lot of mining operations and they are bringing in very cheap labour from those countries by exploiting special working visa rules.

All that said, we can grow all of our own food and we export huge amounts, especially to Asia and the Middle-East. We import food because we can or because someone in China, Vietnam etc can grow and process it for 1/3 the price and even after transporting it, our huge supermarket chains can make more profit doing that. The downside, as Butthead mentions, is that health standards in some of those supplier countries are not good and as we have imported more foods, especially vegetables, there have been more problems with contamination. Because we are an island and we have very high health and bio-security standards, Australian farmers don't have to deal with a lot of the pests and diseases that afflict the rest of the world. We have a reputation for producing very high quality/standard foods. And no genetically modified food crops allowed here either.

We've also done stupid things like allow unsuitable farming on marginal land. For instance, we've had large scale Cotton Farming with its huge demand for water and high use of chemicals badly deplete some of our major river systems and pollute areas downstream. That is being corrected but the damage takes decades to fix. Droughts also mean some of those cotton farms are no longer viable or have the necessary water available for secure production

Over-farming and past poor practices have also resulted in large areas of land suffering from high salinity. The ancient underlying water tables have been dropping faster than they can be replenished. This has been allowing salt to rise to the surface and ruin previously arable land. That is now being addressed but, again, will take a long time to fix.
 
Great explanation, thank you. It's a very interesting situation and it shows just how incredible things are in a place like California which benefits from an excellent growing climate and also an enormous amount of water available to capitalize on. Mind you, look where that got them today.
 
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I would imagine that, despite the import changes, it will still be cheaper to buy a used bike when I visit, rather than pay freight costs to transport my bike to Oz.

I've been gathering intel for my antipodal invasion on Aussie Street Bikes and Bikesales...
 
I would imagine that, despite the import changes, it will still be cheaper to buy a used bike when I visit, rather than pay freight costs to transport my bike to Oz.

I've been gathering intel for my antipodal invasion on Aussie Street Bikes and Bikesales...

Don't forget gumtree, local classified ads all over aus
 
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