Goodbye Toyota

[DaS Energy]

"In a company statement, Toyota cited the high Australian dollar for making exports unviable, as well as the high costs of manufacturing within one of the most fragmented markets in the world"

Bill and Tony are ecstatic another company gone for refusing the cost of burning Coal. Who said they were Global Warming deniers.

With Ford, Holden and Toyota now refusing to pay for the release of millions and millions of tonnes of Carbon to do harm, both leaders are over the moon with happiness.

[Rorschach]

[AiA in Atlanta]

How is the Australian market "fractured?"

Hasn't the AUS $ been on the decline recently? Suppose that doesn't matter much for long-term forecasting however ....

[Rorschach]

The $ is still too high apparently, we have a small market, wages and conditions are uncompetitive to some other labour forces, our car prices are high compared to O/S prices and free trade agreements exacerbate those situations.

[Rorschach]

Toyota quits our shores: The killing of Australia’s car industry
* by: TERRY McCRANN
* From: Herald Sun
* February 11, 2014 12:00AM

THE Australian car industry; born in 1948; died in 2017; just failing to make it to the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten.

Its birth was driven by an odd mix of war-driven fear and post-war exuberance; its death comes from a lethal cocktail of forces after a long, excruciatingly lingering illness.

And so Australia will join Saudi Arabia as the only two countries in the G20 without a domestic car manufacturing industry.

In a somewhat embarrassing irony, the announcement that ended any last remaining hope of the ‘new boy’ on the (down-under engine) block hanging in, after the two once-were giants of the global car industry scuttle back home to Detroit, came barely a week before Australia hosts the G20 in Sydney.

Now, there is going to be a torrent of words written, said and indeed shouted about who and or what killed the car industry. There will be droplets of truth scattered among the waves of misunderstanding and emotion, spin, outright lies, blame shifting and attributing.

At core the truth is all-too simple: the car industry has been living with a terminal illness since the mid-1980s. The illness, long relatively dormant, turned aggressive when China set fire to our resources sector after 2003.

That sent the dollar soaring and, less obviously, put a floor under wages and conditions that the resources industry could afford but manufacturing could not. All manufacturing got hit by the perfect storm of seemingly ever-cheaper imports and sustained high costs.

Further, on a number of levels, the industry simply refused to take the medication that could have extended its life. And by the ‘industry,’ I mean both workers/unions and management.

In short and bluntly, faced with all this, the ‘industry’ committed suicide.

The one interested party that can’t be blamed is the new federal government. Throwing tax money at the producers would not have saved them or the industry; not so long as the four core realities persisted, as they inevitably, irresistibly, were going to.

These were the small production runs, the high value of the Aussie dollar, the absence of any protection against [bimports[/b] (a 5 per cent tariff might as well be zero, and should be now), and the union refusal to embrace massive and revolutionary reform of working conditions.

In the most direct way the workers and the unions at all three companies, Ford, Holden and Toyota voted to keep their working conditions over keeping their jobs. And in the process, they have condemned the jobs of all the other workers among the parts makers.

That said, it might still have been just too late — the individual producers have arguably each passed their individual points of no return.

Ford’s sales of the Falcon had fallen so low, and its prospects of future sales were so dim, it would have been ludicrous for it to contemplate the investment to retool for a future model. And if it was not going to make the Falcon, what would be the point of making a generic world car in Australia?

Much the same goes for Holden, although it arguably still had the basis of a viable indigenous car — the only real point of having an Australian car manufacturing industry. For the Commodore aside, what on earth would be the point of making the same car in high-cost Australia that was being made in Thailand, Korea or even China?

On paper the departure of Holden and Ford could have broken either way for Toyota. That it could scoop up 100 per cent of the demand for an indigenous car, and so get some scale; or, as is the case, the extended links with suppliers became unsustainable when they lost Holden’s demand. The particular problem is that unlike Holden and Ford, Toyota never had an indigenous car. Most of its production is now the globally generic Camry.

In the dying but still living industry of the past decade, Toyota was able to — just — make sense of building some of the Camrys in Australia and sending most of them to the Middle East.

To digress, it might be a fantasy of mine, but arguably if Toyota had quit first, Holden might have been able to make the case for staying on the 100 per cent indigenous car market share basis. But then only with sweeping reform of its industrial relations; and then, perhaps some help from Canberra. But as it stands, for Toyota, just like the other two, it’s impossible to commit to making a global generic car long-term in Australia, when you can make it significantly cheaper somewhere else. But also, when the Australian market is completely open to imports, as a totally bipartisan policy, whichever side is or was actually in government.

Let me add, I am not saying we should have maintained the outrageously high tariffs and other import bans of the ‘good old days.’ That would have made any reform of work practices in the industry impossible; and that would have been very corrosive across the rest of the economy.

It is a matter, though, of degree.

We should not have cut tariffs to just 5 per cent; they could have stopped at, say 20 per cent. And we have always been ludicrously and embarrassingly naive in negotiating so-called ‘free trade agreements’.

Now there is no going back; not between now and 2017; and certainly not after that.

Once the three of them go, they won’t be coming back, ever. And nor will anyone else.

Gee look at that... if you didn't believe me... then try the economist above.

[boxy]

Not really surprising that McCrann agrees with what you spout here, given that he's probably one of the main sources of your Liberal propaganda. May as well quote Bolt or Jones

[Rorschach]

Not really surprising that McCrann agrees with what you spout here, given that he's probably one of the main sources of your Liberal propaganda. May as well quote Bolt or Jones

One day you'll learn about facts... these are things that remain constant no matter the politics and despite the propaganda.

[DaS Energy]

TERRY McCRANN, an employee working for a newspaper and pretending to be a font of information. He wouldn't know he shit himself till he smelt it!

[Chard]

So Toyota is jumping ship on Australia and for the exact same reasons I gave for Holden giving up in another thread. Well, guess maybe you might want to rethink those trade tariffs.

Also, what the fuck does Coal have to do with any of this or is DaS being his normal highly tangential self again? Sure, vast mineral wealth and exportation of it is the crux of your entire economy, but other than driving up the value of the AUD vs the USD, this entire thing was caused by shithead government officials lowering trade tariffs and shithead union laborers demanding far more than they're really worth.

[mantra]

So Toyota is jumping ship on Australia and for the exact same reasons I gave for Holden giving up in another thread. Well, guess maybe you might want to rethink those trade tariffs.

Yes Australia is honing their manufacturing down so we won't be faced with the hard task of thinking about tariffs. We are aiming to become a banana republic and when the last big manufacturer moves offshore - we can concentrate on what we do best - selling off our mineral resources to foreigners to make them wealthy. We want to become one big quarry and rely on importing everything we use and eat. Our export figures are abysmal and likely to get a lot worse as our minerals decline in price.

It's irrelevant that 1 million people are employed in manufacturing because the government is creating a few hundred more jobs in the service industry, so our kids can polish the boots of the fat cats who invest here. Those who can't find work will be put to work picking up papers to earn their food stamps.

Toyota employs 500,000 people directly and indirectly.