no wonder aussie retailers are suffering they often bring it on themselves.
looking for new rear brakes for the suzuki grand vitara i just bought for off road work, and a new drive belt for the air con on the vk 202.
tried repco in the phone book they don't have a listing for the white pages, the yellow pages only had one branch listed miles away, rang him and got the local phone number,rang them and was told repco no longer list in phone book as they expect customers to go on the net ...yeah right...if the other guy wasn't listede i wouldn't have bothered,would have gone elsewhere for parts.
anyway they had the vk belt, 'how many do you want?' had to get brake shoes (brake drums on a 2003 car??? wtf my 93 commy has disk rears and the grand vitara was not exactly an economobile) also dropped in to auto pro to compare prices, they also had the vk belts on the shelf but had to order the shoes in. tried the suzuki dealers, the shoes were not available in wa had to get from brisbane or somewhere, only 2 sets in australia apparently.
repco and autopros prices were within 5bucks at around $71 for the shoes, suzukis price was about $127.
i think we can expect the price of motoring to rise significantly when the importers get rid of australian made cars,and parts become harder to source. i have heard of some continental cars having to wait months for replacement parts, and the 99 kia i had needed a steel heater pipe there were none in the world, had to wait for a production run, as they only do regular runs for lhd, and rhd have to wait.

thanks tony.

I wonder how long it will be before these people who think they will be so much better off with imported cars start screaming when they can't get a part for the Proton or the Great Wall.
Suddenly it will dawn that the Australian product had some great advantages, but it will be too late by then.

Try getting parts for a current model Alfa Romeo

maybe the fact that tony had the chance to keep the aussie auto industry going. and walked away.
chamberlain only affected a few hundred. the auto industry affects thousands and is the basis of australian industry.
lets see them cut all support for primary industry, and transport, and see how they go. sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
and lets not hear the bs about feeding the people. we can import food cheaper than we can grow it.
anyway the ideologists have won the moment we now have to see how it works and remember in 3 years.

Chamberlain was a big manufacturer of tractors and agricultural machinery. John Deere bought them as they were their biggest opposition in Australia. It affected more than a few hundred.
Farmers do get lots of protection. We are all on award wages paid by the tax payer. We get paid to everything. That's why we are all so wealthy.
You can import as much cheap good from China as you want. Nothing like DDT and Dieldren in your veggies. Yum yum.

This is where the car industry started it's decline with the Labour Government and the Button plan. It is worth reading the full story and maybe Tony is then viewed in a different light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_car_plan.
Basically it reads as "The Button car plan, also known as the Button plan was the informal name given to the Motor Industry Development Plan. The plan was an Australian federal government initiative, intended to rationalise the Australian motor vehicle industry and transition it to lower levels of protection" and ends with "This sharing of models proved unpopular with buyers, and original models outsold their badge engineered counterparts.[2] The last of such models, the Toyota Lexcen (Holden Commodore), was dropped in 1997. Rather than share locally assembled models with other manufacturers, Holden, Ford, and Toyota decided to import fully built-up models from subsidiaries elsewhere in the world, mainly Europe and Japan. Mitsubishi Motors did not share models with other manufacturers during the period of the plan and ended Australian manufacturing in 2008; Nissan ended car manufacturing in Australia completely in 1994"

perhaps is everybodies fault. i don't believe you can lay all the blame on the unions. name me one occasion when an employer came out and said to the guys 'hey fellas with inflation and cost of living the way it is i am going to give you all a pay rise' yeah right they always have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the bargaining table. with the adversarial IR system we hve why shouldn't the unions try hard?
i agree and i have said it before the button plan was designed to destroy the australian car industry, button did not believe australia should making cars.
tony said the workers should look on dismissal as the window to a new career. perhaps professional dole recipient.
i wonder how much the costs of the dole, retraining, business support, early retirement, import substitution etc. will outweigh the costs of supporting the local industry.
other countries have no problem supporting the car industry.
maybe the overseas owners did call the shots but it could have been made harder for the, say if some tariffs had been imposed.

How short our memories are.

Holden siad the VE would be the last Australian desinged and manufactured Commodore back in 2006. They never put pen to paper for a replacement, which would have had to happen in around 2009 to 2011.

Governemnts support businesses all the time, they bid for their businesses to be set up in their stae/country. Qld goverment build a powerstation for Comalco to smelt aluminium and sold them power at 2c/kWH when the domestic rate was 11c/kWH. Lets not forget the Victorian and South Australian governments bidding to Holden to build the V6 engine plant back in 2003.

Big business supplies jobs directly and indirectly, and this has to be considered when deciding how much to give to these companies to stay. But there comes a point when they say it is no longer viable.

I see the problem being that governements in this country can only balance the books when the population keeps growing, give them next to zero population growth (or god forbid negative population growth) and they cannot manage it. Plus paying tax in this country is a dirty phrase, we try and pay as little as possible then complain whent he govenment does not have enough to please all the interested parties. (yes they spend money on things that some think is not important, such as art for the art gallery, but putting money to summernats might also be considered by others to be a waste).

Warren

Canada has a GST and a PST(provincial services tax) in some provinces. I don't think we really want that do we?

quote:

---

Originally posted by johnperth
maybe the fact that tony had the chance to keep the aussie auto industry going. and walked away.
chamberlain only affected a few hundred. the auto industry affects thousands and is the basis of australian industry.
lets see them cut all support for primary industry, and transport, and see how they go. sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
and lets not hear the bs about feeding the people. we can import food cheaper than we can grow it.
anyway the ideologists have won the moment we now have to see how it works and remember in 3 years.

---

Yes Tony did walk away from it all as he is a NWO freak and does not support the aussies or even the people who voted the idiot in. don't mention the ALP they are the same NWO socialist idiots as well.
Fact is Australia never did have a capacity to make cars hear ever and that's a fact without Government support. have a look see right from the first FX Holden, if was not for tariffs the answer is never could it get off the ground or support itself, end of story.
The ALP and the Lib's are traitors to the australian people just look and see all the idiot things they do, they are selling us out everywhere the bastards!
The Aussie dollar will come down in the future you know and then where will we be as the Asian currency will come up higher for sure then we have no manufacturing and have to fork out big dollars for the Asian cars. sure to be sure.