As I have commented in various threads - Australia has never been a suitable place for manufacturing. We have far stricter social and environmental constraints and higher fuel and electricity costs than the major manufacturing economies. Add to this a small and scattered domestic market and distance from overseas markets as well as a high currency exchange rate that is propped up by the primary product exports that enable the country to afford the high wages, good working conditions and environmental constraints.
Manufacturing in Australia can only be competitive for specialist niche products, and where some form of subsidy or protection is provided. While this protection can be justified for strategic products (from face masks to vaccines to ordnance), it is difficult to make any sort of case for subsidies for manufacturing commodity goods such as solar panels.
In the early days of European settlement in Australia, there was significant local manufacturing because of very long lead times both to order overseas goods and to ship them. As shipping and communications improved, especially with steamships, railways and telegraphs, local manufacturing declined. This was accelerated by the discovery of gold and the following mining boom (still very much with us), which among other things enabled shorter working hours and, by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the highest living standard in the world.
Manufacturing had a bit of a boom during WW1 due to the shipping shortage, but was largely, although not entirely dismantled, with, for example, the ban on import of complete cars (started during the war to save on shipping space) maintained due to union pressure to maintain jobs in the car industry.
With the Great Depression resulting in job losses, and into the thirties the threat of war, more manufacturing started up, with government subsidies and protection ramping up. During WW2 there were massive advances in manufacturing by necessity, with war on our doorstep and imports even more constrained than during the previous war.
After the war, Australia ramped up manufacturing, with ever increasing subsidies and protection. As communications improved, transport costs decreased, and Australians became more aware of how the other developed economies lived, voters became more and more restive about high subsidies and the resulting high personal income tax, and paying high prices for limited goods that tended to be outdated by world standards.
This led to the winding back of protection from the early seventies under successive (mostly Labor) governments. The inevitable result was the shutting down of most of the protected industries.
John
JDNSW
1986 110 County 3.9 diesel
1970 2a 109 2.25 petrol
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Originally Posted by PhilipA
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