(no subject)
So very like the car industry here. Three out of four "Australian" car manufacturers made very bad choices about what sort of vehicles they should be making here:
Mitsubishi abandoned manufacturing the Colt, and went about upsizing the Magna to the 380. They sank $600 million on it. But no-one bought it, and so despite the obscene amounts of tax benefits, state and federal government subsidy, Mitsubishi doesn't manufacture in Australia anymore.
Ford and Holden make big ugly cars that almost no-one buys for themselves. The people that buy Falcons and Commodores pay for them with other people's money - that is, about 90% of sales are to fleets. It's not surprising that when people can adopt an attitude of "I don’t have to pay for fuel, because I've got Salary Packaging," that they prefer larger vehicles. Everyone else avoids them.
Also, government buyers have policies about local content. So, they prefer to buy whatever locally manufactured vehicles are available. Since this is mostly shitty sixes, that's where the money goes.
And so, we have an industry that is entirely unsupported by consumers. If you look at the total amount of governmental support for Australian car manufacturing and so on, each automotive manufacturing job costs around $400,000.
We could do no worse, knowing governmental industry's inefficiencies, to create a nationalised car manufacturer, paid for entirely out of government coffers employing twice as many people as the automotive manufacturers, and give away the pieces of shit.