Half the problem is we don't have great leaders, they get defeated in negotiations so quickly. They won't stick up for the people who voted them in and only think about getting the cheapest price. Modern day business is always about a race to the bottom.
@@RohanGillett I totally agree,now we have got a big problem with Qantas and only a few years ago it was making huge profits with Geoff Dickson at the helm, its like they are that paranoid that Aussie companies will succeed that they have to throw a spanner in the works, all the political backstabbing they really just want power and they dont give a rats about anything else. and no we dont need resessions no matter what some snake oil salesman tries to sell you. No matter what you think our politicians are literally nothing more than power junkies.
The real scandal (on top of the numerous other scandals involving Australian manufacturing) was that the Government gave these companies MILLIONS in grants and subsidies and those companies sent that money to the US and distributed it to shareholders as profits. Australia was a milking cow for the multinational companies and the tax payer the donor (on life support). Australia WAS the lucky country but that luck ran out around the time this documentary was made - the mid 1980's.
The last segment in which the union head was interviewed was very prophetic. Four things killed Australian car manufacturing... A failure of the manufacturers to respond to the changing tastes of the public who wanted smaller and more economical cars or SUVs, a disgraceful stab in the back by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey when they were in power and both GM and Ford bailing out rather than standing up to the challenge of building things other than Falcons and Commodores.. The final nail in the coffin was our free trade agreement with Thailand which allowed the car companies to source their cars cheaply there and sell them to us at a premium mark-up. Ironically that "free trade" doesn't work both ways because if you tried to sell an Australian-made car in Thailand it would still attract a 15% duty whereas Thai-built cars attract virtually no duty in Australia. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot! Dumb...really dumb! In WW2 Sir Lawrence Hartnett had the Holden factories making war materiel within three weeks of being requested to by the federal government. If there was ever another war the only things we could probably make would be cheap wooden boomerangs...and even then the Chinese manufacturers would undercut us!!!
If you remember Australia used to build small cars but the lowering of tarrifs in the mid 90's on small cars from Korea made that unviable. I know I started working in the industry in 2000. You need at least one massive company or at least 3 smaller companies to keep the components companies going and producing parts at a price which would make the car affordable. In one hand the government wanted to tax and regulate the arse out of all industries on the other hand it allowed the country to be flooded with imports. Business can produce without the government interference. The government done such a great job with manufacturing it is now turning it's attention has turned to agriculture so within 20 years Australians will starve without imported food. The car companies should have left then on mass and let the government talk tuff to their backs. The problem in Australia is cultural not political and it is now reaping what it has sown.
Leon...I couldn't agree more. Industry policy in Australia has always been a farce. The biggest mistake our country made happened just after WWII. At the time the government wanted to produce an "Australian car". The aim was to reduce our dependence on agriculture and mining and become a sophisticated manufacturer of goods. So tenders were called for. GM jumped in and promised an Australian-made car and showed off their existing factories. An all-Australian group made a submission as well but failed. They failed because we Australians felt we owed the Americans a debt of gratitude for how they defended Australia in WWII. Even then GM had the cheek to get millions of pounds in finance almost interest-free from our government. How stupid...one of the smallest countries in the world financing the biggest corporation in the world! Anyway...the rest is history. We got our Holdens and Fords...they were okay but they were NEVER Australian cars, no matter how we'd like to think otherwise. They were all operated from Detroit. We should have gone with the Aussie tender and that's what has cursed us as a nation until this day. We have lots of smart scientists, etc... but they all go overseas because our government does not support start-up industries or manufacturing. They interfere, tax the hell out of things and generally sell off everything to overseas buyers. As you say, now they are doing the same thing with our agriculture. Dumd...short-sighted and disgraceful! We've gone full circle, from living off the sheep's back and mining, through manufacturing and back to living off the sheep's back and mining! As a kid I remember that everything we had in our house was Made in Australia. Not anymore!
Blame the Australian people, myself included. Seriously, the real (end) answer was people buying small cars, 4x4s ect... and I wonder why? Alexander would be turning in his grave to see what people have done and said about his name.
One other factor was huge. The "Dutch disease" (ie the high AUD driven by mineral prices during the mining boom). That made Australian exports very uncompetitive. Something people forget is in the early-mid 2000s the largest ever number of Holden exports were achieved. This was when the AUD was lower than when they started to get into trouble.
They were the workers who built the Cars....Didn't hear an Aussie talking because they thought they were too good to work in a Car Manufacturing Factory. So without them there would probably be No Holden at all!!!
Note by 1952 Holden Australia GMH was a wholly owned subsidiary of GM America. So were it not for the Commonwealth Government via the Commonwealth Bank and other Australian banks it would not have happened... but given that it was no longer "our car" thanks to the Double Tax Act 1956 GM paid no Corporate taxes in Australia, after that date but still continued to take money from government (note the small g intentional)
The early 80s were the worst era for GMH with the Camira,The Early jackaroos,Some early Commodores had appalling build quality.Even the Wheel Covers had missing impressions on the bottom of the Lion. My Uncle who worked as a senior manager in GMH said it was called the Sinking Lion Era..Referring to the wheel trims appearance.Fact.He had Hj caprices and Sle Commodores as his company Cars So he was high up and even his Cigarettes were paid for....So good for him....Just a Gravy Train..Free trips everywhere.Wifey jad a free company car changed over every 6 months.Awesome days if you had a High paying job with G.M Australia ❤
joe thompson was right and his statements are still correct today across all trades in this country! Indian security guards are NOT skilled workers! braindead
The Union man was right...we've just lost it all. If only that idiot Button had of had a bit more foresight. Really, "that's their problem" is not a sufficient answer when you reduce tariffs on a small market from about 40% to 5%. How on earth could they compete? It was and is insanity spread over 30 years. Goodbye Ford, Goodbye Holden, Goodbye Toyota
i totally agree and we should have at least had a policy to only allow one car to be imported for every car made here, that way you have the best of both worlds, you could have seen this being the result, to many chiefs and not enough Indians. and I agree that short sighted greed and not enough foresight has resulted in the loss of this industry here, we should have had made the right move twenty years ago, but you could go back further to have avoided being black mailed by GM, we should have went with the more modern Hartnet design instead of the American designed FX which was more traditional, GM has been a hindrance.you could have avoided all this foreign interference but greed took over.
So the government should keep paying them subsidies and giving them bullshit grants while they move the money offshore ( paying fake financing costs to the mother company) so they do not make money on paper and therefore pay no tax in Australia.
One has to ask why the corporations went to such trouble and expense to remove the human being from their manufacturing model. I assume that it was not to give the workers more free time but rather because they were a limiting factor. Who’s fault that was is also up for debate but it’s a pattern repeated all over the world as societies developed and became more prosperous. People priced themselves out of the market.
And people within GMH were aware of that lead designer proposed commodore as a Torana replacement with an updated Kingswood for the 80s proposed, he was given a pittance to update the current range only affording to do a WB style facelift and commenting it was not going to be enough. Needless to say GM USA forced the world car onto Australia as a cost saving measure which after upgrades and redesigns for our conditions it cost more to develop than the XD falcon
@@sutherlandA1 I agree 100%. The final proposal for the WB Kingswood is in the Birdwood museum in South Australia. Let's just say that if they released it, the only thing it would have achieved is to upset buyers of the HX and HZ Statesman's.
One thing proven is the average American board cant compete with foreign car companies. The big 3 pulled out of RHD vehicles, gifted that to foreigners. Now they have a South African showing them how to build cars on their own patch. I can see the big 3 will end as as pickup only and a limited production performance car and thats it.
The over Americanisation of Australia is something I passionately hate! It's infuriating! I have nothing against Americans they are a great ally but Australia is not the U.S. though year after year Australia becomes more and more Americanised.
Holden was a great company, on its own, but the American GM parent company ruined us, they were towards the end more about profits, and less about what the Australian people wanted, this was their downfall, by 2021, GM decided that they were pulling put of Australia altogether. Rip Holden
The beginning of the end for Holden was when Mary Barra sold off Opel/ Vauxhall to French car maker PSA. Rumours circulated that they tried to throw in the Holden brand with it… But dice it was already clear by the time the VF was being sold that the next gen Commodore what not be locally designed & built it would be coming from Europe ( again) . I’m sure Locally Holden knew it was on Life support, but had its life cut when when GMH decided to pull out of A/NZ. Mary Barra’s decision to pull GM out of all RHD markets would have been the eventual death of Holden.
Thanks Lib-Lab gumminets for destroying Aussie crucial industries ! and to that "minister" Button ....did you know that most countries do support financially their auto industries ?
Worst era of car manufacturing was the late 70s and till the early 90s Nissan Dissappeareared in Aus in the Early 90s then Mitsubishi then Ford then Holden in 2017 in Adelaide.A sorry state of affairs.Now we dont build much of anything
everything about the jobs going ofsore that he said on that doco back in 1986 has come true yet the stupid goverment back then didnt listen and even now in 2013 still dont listen to peoples plea's wich gets me thinking why do we still have a goverment if it NEVER listens to its people?
Nothing to do with "not listening" more like "that was the plan". Gough Whitlam signed the LIMA act in the 70's which was the deliberate plan to move manufacturing to Asia. The Globalist agenda was to remove manufacturing from wealthy countries to developing ones and as a vassal state under Globalist control Gough obeyed his masters. Go look it up.
Even then, there seems to be an air of inevitability in the tone of this documentary. It took another 25 years for the hammer to come down. Senator Button must have known, I would have thought, but yet he seems convincing here. He knew about Detroit surely.
@@gogogeedus May I ask respectfully, how was it that politicians f@#¥&d things up, so to speak? What policy decisions did they make that were wrong? Or what general direction or philosophy was wrong?
@@mebeasenseiWell! our industries needed protection,35 years ago and this would have guaranteed their future, we didn't have a huge market and cant compete with some of the major auto manufacturers, it is basically what the Europeans had in mind with the Eu. politicians have been concentrating on their power trips and forgetting about securing our economic future, I don't want to be too critical as I wouldn't want to have the responsibility of their job or the pressure from influences they have to deal with but I have known the way things would turn out, politicians need to be thinking 20 or 50 years ahead and not being totally engrossed on the now. I had grand visions of Holden producing electric cars or carrying out R&D into hydrogen tech but we have been sold out. I could go on but thats for starters.
@@mebeasensei I dont know if its a philosophy but a bit of respect for skill and craftsmanship, the Europeans, Asians and all other first world countries have respect for skilled craftsmen, I believe skills and craft must carry on to the future to evolve, drinking beer and smoking dope is not a skill and it will not lead to prosperity, are politicians promoting drug use maybe not directly but if young people dont have any opportunities to be involved in some fulfilling occupation it may be more likely.
@@gogogeedus yes, I did too, there is an argument that GM were just milking the system for subsidies to subsidy, and basically leveraging the government, squeezing the tax dollar out of the, whilst making cars that were over priced....However, it is an interesting argument. I worked at GM from 92 to 94. And I had visions of all aluminum engines, electric this and that....what really disappointed me was that it all just folded so quickly.
I believe that Australia is more than capable of producing good quality products, that they shouldn't have to rely on China to produce everything that they use. I think Australia simply needs help to do that.
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Australia NEEDS its own automobile industry, now is our chance to go Electric and make better long distance batteries for Australian distances ... just saying, there are worst things we could invest in ...why not our own manufacturing future
The tariff is what kept the car industry alive in Australia. Sure, as shit it wasn't the cars. Changing the grill or tail lights is about the best you could hope for, mechanical they were pretty much all the same as the model 20 years earlier. I can remember my old man's 1974 model Peugeot having 4 wheel disc brakes, standard on their cars, Holden/Ford it was about 1990. People accepted it and took it until they saw what the Japanese could produce for same sort of money, all over then
That large sign is misspelled! It should be *Uniroyal Tyres!* (21:19) *"Tire"* is a verb, meaning to physically and/or mentally exhaust oneself while *"Tyre"* is a noun, referring to the rubber rim of a wheel(of a car, lorry, bus, or even a motorbike or a pushbike).
@@jobail01 It's you Yanks who don't get it! It's not a matter of "doing things differently", it's a matter of *TREATING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WITH PROPER RESPECT BY FOLLOWING PROPER SPELLING CONVENTIONS!*
It's unforgivable that the Australian automobile industry seems to be leaving Australia. First, it's Toyota of Australia, next it's Holden of Australia. Who's next? Ford of Australia? :(
Sorry about bumping an old comment but ford was first, closing factory later this year (2016), then it was Holden, closing in 2017 then lastly Toyota in 2017 too
+Wtrxprs007able Like I said, it's *damn unforgivable* that that's happening. It's as if the Australian govt. is letting Australia go to Hell. And it's not just GMH that seems to be letting its car industry go to Hell. All the Australian car makers are being allowed to disintegrate. Next thing you know, there won't be any Australian produced cars. The same thing, sadly, is happening in the USA.
+Trevon Cowen I'm not against importing cars from Japan, Germany, and the UK if their cars are better built. But that shouldn't mean either of our countries should just let other countries dominate our markets without having something to counter the import market, something to either equal, or better than what the imports offered. Both our countries need skilled labourers working again.
+Jason Carpp the sad thing is that GM's answer to the Japanese car market is to replace all of the workers with computers I have a Buick Regal from that era and it's unreliable as shit now they trying style every car after the corvette or comaro and the sad thing is the variety in cars are disappearing all the ford's look like deformed or fat mustangs the only company not doing that is Fiat Chrysler
What I don't understand is if the Holden was an Australian brand, why should they have had to ask General Motors Detroit USA for permission to build their own cars?
I seen a Holden here in the US at a car show.I'm confused about the steering wheel.It was like an American Chevrolet with the steering on the left side like all American cars yet while I watched this I seen Australian cars with right side steering and others with left side steering.Which is it?
It would have been converted to left hand drive unless it was an early export model designed for a country where their cars were left hand drive. to begin with..do you remember what make/model the car was?
Holden did sell a fair amount of cars in Hawaii during the sixties, and there are numerous other models which have been privately imported (including SL/R 5000 Toranas and Monaros).
@@neilforbes416 - I like to joke that we say in the States that there's a right side of the road, and a wrong side of the road. That's why we drive on the right side of the road!
Well, we Aussies drive on the left side, and that's right(correct) for us. Our car steering wheels are on the right of the vehicle. And also, we use proper terms - accelerator pedal(instead of gas pedal), bonnet(not hood), boot(not trunk), windscreen(not windshield). We fuel our cars with petrol(not gasoline), We fit tyres to our wheels, note the spelling, "t-y-r-e", whereas "t-I-r-e", tire, means to physically and/or mentally exhaust oneself.
I feel a better term must be used for 'unskilled' work as alluded to by various guests. A somewhat derogatory term that does not recognise the shear effort to stand all day and do repetitive hard work in order to make products or perform a service. Any suggestions for a better name ..?
As much as I respect Laurence Hartnett's contribution towards the Australian car industry, I'm very gald his design for the first Holden wasn't accepted, it was fugly.
GMs aim was crazy. Fully robotised production. Sack all the workers. Who, is supposed to be ABLE to afford said product? And 2020, Saturn division has long gone (2008)?
Rest on your laurels...just expect brand loyality and think your customer isnt educated...NOT make a competitive Car...Manufacture only "One" model (commodore) and your bound to go broke! It was always going to happen!
The reality is robots don’t have a bad day they don’t complain They don’t ring up sick and They don’t do a shabby job on a Monday and they don’t go on strike if people were doing exactly what they were paid to do every time on the production line robots would not be required people would have jobs and a chunk of this problem would have been solved not all of it but a decent chunk And now we’ve got nothing
Until the break down or do a shoddy job due to bad maintenance or lack of upgrades which can be very expensive from lost production and to fix , at least humans can be flexible and multi skilled
@@sutherlandA1 Yes they can be multiskilled but then they ask for more money and when they don’t get it they go on strike and when they go on strike production goes down because nobody else can do the job because they’ve been specially trained and the whole cycle starts again……
It’s a crime that our pm didnt throw money at Holden and keep it going despite GM pulling out, like they did buying submarines etc and then canceling them and causing millions to be wasted. Our car industry should have stayed, could have gone electric and exported them or just kept jobs going, they should be ashamed.
