Making cars makes us all smarter
Only a couple of years ago, Australia was included in a handful of nations capable of designing, developing and mass manufacturing motorcars.
That made me and many Australians proud.
My disappointment with the loss of Australia’s passenger vehicle manufacturing industry was sadly rekindled recently when reading an article about the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development study, Atlas of Economic Complexity.
The study highlighted Australia’s dismal ranking, falling from 57th to 93rd between 1995 to 2017 in the global economic complexity stakes, while Japan and Switzerland have consistently led the pack.
What this means for us as a country is, we’re not that clever. While we’ve been digging rocks out of the ground, countries like India and Turkey – in a very short time – have leapfrogged us with their superior technology and manufacturing capability.
The study pointed out what many of us feel is obvious: if we don’t make complex things, with lots of high-level technology, we run the risk of being relegated to a largely minerals-based export market.
Why is it we need big studies to tell us the obvious?
When the government encouraged passenger vehicle manufacturing to leave Australia, we dug a big economic hole in this country by reducing our economic complexity and industrial bandwidth.
Matched only by the big hole we make digging up things from the ground, it was a bad idea with longer term consequences we’re only now just experiencing.
My hope is that we can get back in the game as electric vehicles become mainstream.
Words: VACC CEO, Geoff Gwilym. As featured in the Herald Sun 6 December 2019.
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