I was talking to some car club people recently about the loss of car manufacturing in Australia, and accuracy of restored cars.
I thought I'd just crunch a few numbers. Happy to have any of the assumptions below corrected or challenged.

The heyday of car manufacturing in Australia seems to have been in the late '60s/early 70s, so I chose the HT as an example.
It ran for just a bit over 12 months, and during that time a total of just over 183,000 were produced.
The production volume was split about 30%/30%/20%/15%/5% between Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth locations respectively.
Just to choose one plant as an example, Dandenong, the numbers look something like:

Weeks of production: 50 (Assuming some plant shutdowns for holidays etc)
Share of HT Volume: 183000 x 0.3 = 54,900 cars produced.
Volume per week: 54,900/50 = 1098
Volume per day: 219

219 cars per day. Just imagine how that actually looks. For around a 10 hour shift, 22 cars per hour, or more than one every 3 minutes.
Ignoring the parts GM-H produced themselves, the volume of parts produced by outside vendors is incredible. eg:

Wheels: 1,095 per day.
Wheel nuts: 4,380 per day
5/16" UNC fender bolts: 7,884 per day.
Assorted spring clips: 43,800 per day.
Assorted rubber weatherstrips: 3,942 per day.
etc etc.

And that's for one plant, representing 30% of the total GM-H requirement.
Someone had to design those parts, draw them, order them, source the material, make them, transport them, and store them before they ever got bolted on a car.

The number of people outside of GM-H involved must have been enormous, particularly with so many of the systems manual - no email, no computerised production systems, no business to business ecommerce. All pen and paper.
50 years later I marvel that they were actually able to achieve it. Every day.

It tends to explain why we see so many variations on cars we are restoring these days - the daily scramble for parts to finish cars would explain a lot.

I know current production volumes are low by comparison, but even today I'm not sure the full ramifications of sending all those jobs overseas is fully understood.

One of the most worrying things about the loss of the vehicle industry in Australia comes when you look at what has happened to cities in the U.S when vehicle production shuts down. A good example is South Bend, Indiana which was the home of Studebaker. When the plant closed in 1963, nothing ever came along to replace it and the old timers say that South Bend has never really recovered from the loss. After 50 years of nothing, there are moves to use the space occupied by the plant for new business ventures, but thats a long time to wait for the void to be filled.
Will Elizabeth still be suffering from the Holden closure 50 years from now? I really hope not, but examples like this from other cities that have lost a key employer would make it seem a real possibility.

I watched a show on all this a while back and the powers to be think the only way for Australia to go is a service driven economy rather than a manufacturing one....The Brits tried this and it failed so they have started manufacturing again.....

I have done some touring up through the north of NSW and all those Tobacco towns are all but closed down...There is not one farmer growing tobacco there anymore.Towns like Ashford, Bingara and the likes....Its sad to see..Same thing is happening with the irrigation water licences...the small money/family is selling his water off to the multi nationals and the local economy suffers then up go the boards on the local shop windows....I stopped at a town and was the only person in the RSL club....They gave the caravan park keys out....I bet its closed next time I go back.