8 ms·

This is hardly surprising when you know a little local history. For reference: I grew up in Adelaide, about 15-20 minutes drive (15 km.. erm 9.3 miles for you

This is hardly surprising when you know a little local history. For reference: I grew up in Adelaide, about 15-20 minutes drive (15 km.. erm 9.3 miles for you lot) from the suburb where the Holden factory is located. I remember as a student/early graduate (so, 2000 - 2003ish) having.. acquaintances who were in their early 20's, bringing home close to $AUD100K/year, for assembling commodores. People who would laugh about how funny it is to let a car leave the production line, with the wrong colour door handle fitted. Another "acquaintance" took forever to get a resolution because his 2-door ute was delivered to him with a 20cm gap in the carpet on the passenger side. It went through the factory, through QA, through a DEALER and nobody fucking noticed a 20cm gap on the passenger side of the floor. These were not high quality cars being built by well trained craftsmen. They weren't even average quality cars built by moderately trained craftsmen. They were pieces of shit slapped together by over paid idiots.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
noddy1 9y ago
The typical young Australian male is a pretty special breed - lazy, entitled, willfully ignorant and undereducated - the result of having it too good for too long. I would never buy a car built by these overpaid idiots when I could get a japanese or south korean car.
- crispinb 9y ago
  You've been unsurprisingly downvoted, but there's some truth to what you say, as long as 'typical' is parsed as 'stereotypical' rather than something more mathematical. Anyone who has spent any time in Australia knows the type well. My guess however is that the stereotype represents a shrinking proportion of actual Aussie males, though they're still there. We all have our own selection bias of course, but in my experience young Australian men are a pretty big improvement on their bald barrel-shaped shock-jock-addled beer-guzzling 4WDing [poofter/boong/woman/asian/tree/whatever]-hating coal-loving fathers who so despoil the Australian suburban landscape.
  - flamedoge 9y ago
    Interestingly it speaks a lot about the difference in culture--people rewarding excellence wherever its origin is vs. people working feverishly to excellence to whatever detriment in anything else.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  "-the result of having it too good for too long." Whenever I hear a statement like this I wonder what they did to have it so "good". I've never been to Australia, but they never struck me as lazy. I picked up on a sence of risk taking that used to be possible in America.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  There is something to be said for some of this. There is a certain complacency and unwillingness to engage self-critical awareness. Don't believe me? Many Australian men are two inches away from overt racism on one side, and super-duper-liberal-moral-high-grounder on the other. That said, Australians are generally very kind and fun. But hard work and struggle builds both character and moral fortitude, and the typical Australian male is without either: They're gfted a generous opportunity, chilling out on the doll, or pushing papers in some uncompetitive bureaucracy.
  - linuxkerneldev 9y ago
    > Australian men are two inches away from overt racism on one side, I used to have several Australian coworkers who were generally quite pleasant and easy to work with, but several of them had an attitude and their interaction with dark skinned individuals was shocking. Having overheard them arguing with another Australian coworker about the case of the "abo gal fucked to death", I'm not surprised by your description using the terms "overt racism on one side, and super-duper-liberal-moral-high-grounder on the other". Their conversation was peppered with racist stereotypes, going as far as to blame the victim as being an "abo whore". I found out later that the victim was Lynette Daley, a young aboriginal woman who had been drugged and then, shockingly, literally, raped to death "blunt force genital tract trauma". There was little to no coverage of this here, but it does seem to have attracted at least a little attention in Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/nsw-dpp-under-scrutiny-over-lynette-daleys-unprosecuted-killing/7393368 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/nsw-dpp-under-scrutiny...
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      Yea exacrly. We also sort of have this kind of dichotomy in America. As a matter of public policy, our wars and policies unfairly target Muslims while we preach that any and all discrimination is illegal and intolerable. I like how the South Park creators put it: https://i.redd.it/bbwo4ropuesz.jpg https://i.redd.it/bbwo4ropuesz.jpg
    - emmelaich 9y ago
      Really? I'm Australian and I've worked in factories, in airlines, in government, in the country and the city and I have never seen or heard overt racism. I did see it in Netherlands though. I also worked for a few years in Netherlands, and I was shocked to see a woman, one of the management / HR mock the only black employee relentlessly with monkey noises.
- micky_25 9y ago
  >The typical young Australian male is a pretty special breed - lazy, entitled, willfully ignorant and undereducated - the result of having it too good for too long. I like to think HN hasn't digressed into the equivalent of youtube's comment section but reading comments like yours makes me reconsider. Pathetic comments like yours are destroying what was once a great community.
- dang 9y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do this, so would you please read and scrupulously abide by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on?
avar 9y ago
And now in the coming decades you get to watch the slow process of people becoming increasingly nostalgic about Holden cars as survivor bias ensures that only the best specimens survive. "Look at that old Holden! Hasn't needed a repair once in 30 years, not like these shitty foreign imports you get today!".
- vwcx 9y ago
  And the same process will occur with the memories of their jobs. In X years, a politician will harken back to the days of a strong local economy where high-quality products were produced internally and provided a living wage. Slogans will be created ("MAGA" works in Australia) and campaigns will be run. Nostalgia and lies are tricky bedfellows.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I mean, it seems hard to disagree that things were better in Rust Belt cities before deindustrialization. You might quibble about why it happened or what should be done about it but Detroit went from being a beautiful, world-class city to a byword for crime and urban decay within living memory and plenty of smaller cities are worse off.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Hm? Detroit ungentrified, housing became affordable, artist communities flourished, over-policing went away, corrupting corporate influences and (especially) real estate developers vanished. Detroit is everything every growing liberal city claims to want and writes public policy to work towards.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Yeah, that doesn't sound like an argument I actually want to engage with.
      - nate_meurer 9y ago
        Wasn't there a bankruptcy in there somewhere? > "corrupting corporate influences and (especially) real estate developers vanished" ... and were replaced with a level of government corruption (and incompetence) that would have been funny if it weren't so sad.
sofaofthedamned 9y ago
This is just like the death throes of the Rover MG models in the UK. In 1999 (or thereabouts) I was sick of being run off the road on my motorbike and decided to buy a car. Being an IT contractor with silly Y2K rates going on, I had plenty of disposable cash. First dealer was Toyota, Bill Allen's of Cheltenham. The salesman looked at me, decided I didn't have money then completely ignored me. Nice. Second was an MG garage whos name escapes me. Literally every car was was wrong - either the doors didn't fit, or there was a clunk when they closed, or in one case they didn't bother fitting the rear brake light (internal) correctly and it fell off during the test drive. I have never seen such a rubbish car in my life, literally each one I saw looked like it had been built on a Friday afternoon. No wonder they went bust. Another anecdote: My boss at the time was awesome and from Birmingham, right next to the Rover/MG plant. He asked me to do a speech for his wedding anniversary, so I went along to a social club next door to the factory. I noticed there were hardly any of their own cars in the employee car park, it was all Ford, Mazda, etc. This tells its own tale, at a time where 'Buy British and save Rover' was trumpeted everywhere.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Those cars were trash, worse they even looked like a bad Ford rip-off, which are themselves cheap looking cars any way.
  - wbillingsley 9y ago
    I had a mini, which was a very unique and fun design, and once had a Rover Metro as a temporary car while our car was in the garage -- also a vey fun car to drive and solid as anything. Supposedly, the problem Rover hit was though their last-developed large car (Rover 75) was very good and reasonably popular, since they'd been pulled away from working with Honda by the sale to BMW, they had neither a modern middle-sized car nor a replacement for the Metro. Put that together with being passed from hand-to-hand (from BAe to BMW was 6 years, BMW to Phoenix another 6, and Phoenix lasted another 5) in an industry struggling from overproduction, and it was always problematic. Whenever Citroen, GM, etc have gone bust, their respective governments have always stepped in. Competing in a loss-making industry against government-backed competitors is one tough game.
azernik 9y ago
Note that it's not just Holden that went under - foreign car companies (Toyota, for example) also have closed their local plants, despite probably very different workplace cultures. It's probably more to do with a small local market, and strong exports of raw materials (and hence a strong currency) making imports more competitive.
- stephenr 9y ago
  Holden was a foreign car company, no different than ford or Toyota. The only difference is Toyota models are just imported from elsewhere because they have a mostly global product line. Ford and GM Holden now need to find either European or North American models to import that will suit the local market.
  - tomhoward 9y ago
    One of Ford Australia's replacements for the Falcon (the Australian-built middle-of-the-road large family/commercial sedan [1]), is the Mustang, so in the past few years we've seen an influx of these American muscle-cars onto Australian roads. They're not quite to my taste, but hey each to their own. The other replacement is the European-built Mondeo, which is much more like the Falcon and far less offensive IMO. [1] https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/ford/falcon/ https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/ford/falcon/
    - sundvor 9y ago
      The safety record of the Mustang is horrid. Absolute shit engineering. You'd have to be rather silly to buy one: http://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/releases/ford-mustang-scores-concerning-2-star-safety-rating-3aaab9 http://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/releases/ford-must...
      - b0b10101 9y ago
        Safety isn't everything you know. The lowest scoring component (Safety Assist for stuff like speed assistance systems, lane support systems etc...) is basically about removing control from the driver and considering the target demographic for the Mustang, it makes not having them make sense. Some cars are made to be enjoyed and "safety" is increasingly compromising that concept.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jackvalentine 9y ago
> I remember as a student/early graduate (so, 2000 - 2003ish) having.. acquaintances who were in their early 20's, bringing home close to $AUD100K/year, for assembling commodores. This figure likely included a lot of overtime - the average annual salary at the Elizabeth plant was only $60,000 according to Senator Kim Carr.
- scriptman 9y ago
  When annual salaries get reported in this context, you have to watch for the pea and the thimble trick where they take the base hourly rate and multiply that by standard hours to arrive at the annual salary, but nobody actually gets paid this amount. This is because the base rate leaves out all of the various loadings that are applied under different circumstances. There are so many circumstances for loadings that the base rate becomes meaningless. Overtime is only one way to get paid more than the base rate. Also, overtime becomes a meaningless word when you can get overtime just for working slightly non-standard hours, as opposed to working extra hours. The agreements are written in a way that makes it really hard to calculate what a worker is actually likely to get paid annually. The only way to be certain is to look at the worker's group certificate for tax purposes. So, while what Senator Carr said was probably technically correct, it was also meaningless since I would suggest that no worker was actually paid that amount in a year. It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    I think my point is the same as yours - that you can't take figures reported on face value. > It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was. I think a better figure yet would be the average amount per FTE.
    - scriptman 9y ago
      You are right that per FTE is probably a better measure technically, but this just leaves the unions a loophole: they can just classify workers as something other than FTE. They are very clever at finding these sorts of loopholes and exceptions. What they can't do though is lie to the tax office. That crosses a threshold from being misleading to being illegal. There is a big incentive for unions to be misleading about what their members are paid. It's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from the public when the average member of the public is paid a lot less than the average union member. That's not to say that this is always the case - the wages, agreements and marketing to the public by the unions varies significantly between unionised industries.
mc32 9y ago
How is it that smaller countries like Malaysia and Taiwan can support their own native car industry (while also importing foreign cars) but Australia can't? Are the tariffs just not as high to effectively subsidize their local car industry? To add. I think those counties understand that the car industry helps to invigorate many other parts of the economy, so it's sad to see AUS let that go like that.
- stephenr 9y ago
  Good question. Maybe lower salaries for factory workers.
- JimmyAustin 9y ago
  A combination of labour costs, being the most isolated country on earth and a tiny local market. Malaysia's GDP per capita is <20% of Australias (49k vs 9k), and the population is 30% bigger (30mil vs 24mil), not to mention the surrounding local markets (Thailand at 68 mil, Vietnam at 92.7mil).
  - stephenr 9y ago
    Thailand taxes all imported cars at something like 120%. (So a 50K car becomes a 110K) to encourage the local industry.
  - jen729w 9y ago
    Enormous import tax rates! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_motor_vehicle_import_duties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_motor_vehicle_import...
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  If a particular indsutry lacks comparative advantage in some country (in this case Australia) it only stands to reason that others do have comparative advantage in it. So you we can speculate why, in a complicated world, the (cars, Australia) paring works badly while the (education, Australia) and (cars, [South!] Korea) pairings work well and the (cars, Taiwan) paring is somewhere in between. But an important answer behind all of these is: The market speaketh thus.
WalterBright 9y ago
There's even a Trabby museum in Berlin. http://www.trabi-museum.com/home http://www.trabi-museum.com/home
scriptman 9y ago
The labour unions were unwilling to compromise to stay competitive with international factories. I was surprised when it was reported that Toyota wanted to reduce the Christmas shutdown period from 21 days to 10 days in line with other international factories and the union rejected this. This was in the context of other car manufacturers shutting down in Australia at the time and they had to know that this attitude was risking Toyota leaving as well, but they just couldn't accept a reduction in any conditions. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toyotas-altona-plant-to-start-21day-shutdown-amid-survival-fears-20131217-2zj05.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toyotas-altona-plant-to-st...
- sgift 9y ago
  While I'm not sure that this is a great example for it there's always the matter of deciding if any job is really better than no job - sure, you could stay competitive with other places/countries by matching ever worse conditions, but is that really a good idea? Is a job which doesn't pay someone a living wage really a job that should exist?
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > Is a job which doesn't pay someone a living wage really a job that should exist? Should people who have other means of support be allowed to hold jobs?
  - scriptman 9y ago
    I think you've moved the goal posts a long way there. A living wage as defined by the Harvester judgement, which seems to be what you are referencing, was based on begin paid enough money to be able to afford food, shelter and clothing for a family. In the case I'm referencing the dispute is over whether the workers should have their standard break for Christmas reduced from 21 days to 10 days. I can't think of any other companies within Australia that offer such a generous Christmas break, but maybe there are some; i think it would be a very small number. What they were being asked to give up seemed very generous and the replacement of 10 days instead doesn't seem onerous - it still seems generous compared to many companies. You'd have to ask the workers that lost their jobs if they are now better off having lost their jobs rather than stay competitive with other places by bringing their conditions in line with what is typical even within the country they live in.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

noddy1 9y ago

The typical young Australian male is a pretty special breed - lazy, entitled, willfully ignorant and undereducated - the result of having it too good for too long. I would never buy a car built by these overpaid idiots when I could get a japanese or south korean car.

crispinb 9y ago
You've been unsurprisingly downvoted, but there's some truth to what you say, as long as 'typical' is parsed as 'stereotypical' rather than something more mathematical. Anyone who has spent any time in Australia knows the type well. My guess however is that the stereotype represents a shrinking proportion of actual Aussie males, though they're still there. We all have our own selection bias of course, but in my experience young Australian men are a pretty big improvement on their bald barrel-shaped shock-jock-addled beer-guzzling 4WDing [poofter/boong/woman/asian/tree/whatever]-hating coal-loving fathers who so despoil the Australian suburban landscape.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  Interestingly it speaks a lot about the difference in culture--people rewarding excellence wherever its origin is vs. people working feverishly to excellence to whatever detriment in anything else.
icantdrive55 9y ago
"-the result of having it too good for too long." Whenever I hear a statement like this I wonder what they did to have it so "good". I've never been to Australia, but they never struck me as lazy. I picked up on a sence of risk taking that used to be possible in America.
wallace_f 9y ago
There is something to be said for some of this. There is a certain complacency and unwillingness to engage self-critical awareness. Don't believe me? Many Australian men are two inches away from overt racism on one side, and super-duper-liberal-moral-high-grounder on the other. That said, Australians are generally very kind and fun. But hard work and struggle builds both character and moral fortitude, and the typical Australian male is without either: They're gfted a generous opportunity, chilling out on the doll, or pushing papers in some uncompetitive bureaucracy.
- linuxkerneldev 9y ago
  > Australian men are two inches away from overt racism on one side, I used to have several Australian coworkers who were generally quite pleasant and easy to work with, but several of them had an attitude and their interaction with dark skinned individuals was shocking. Having overheard them arguing with another Australian coworker about the case of the "abo gal fucked to death", I'm not surprised by your description using the terms "overt racism on one side, and super-duper-liberal-moral-high-grounder on the other". Their conversation was peppered with racist stereotypes, going as far as to blame the victim as being an "abo whore". I found out later that the victim was Lynette Daley, a young aboriginal woman who had been drugged and then, shockingly, literally, raped to death "blunt force genital tract trauma". There was little to no coverage of this here, but it does seem to have attracted at least a little attention in Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/nsw-dpp-under-scrutiny-over-lynette-daleys-unprosecuted-killing/7393368 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-09/nsw-dpp-under-scrutiny...
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    Yea exacrly. We also sort of have this kind of dichotomy in America. As a matter of public policy, our wars and policies unfairly target Muslims while we preach that any and all discrimination is illegal and intolerable. I like how the South Park creators put it: https://i.redd.it/bbwo4ropuesz.jpg https://i.redd.it/bbwo4ropuesz.jpg
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    Really? I'm Australian and I've worked in factories, in airlines, in government, in the country and the city and I have never seen or heard overt racism. I did see it in Netherlands though. I also worked for a few years in Netherlands, and I was shocked to see a woman, one of the management / HR mock the only black employee relentlessly with monkey noises.
micky_25 9y ago
>The typical young Australian male is a pretty special breed - lazy, entitled, willfully ignorant and undereducated - the result of having it too good for too long. I like to think HN hasn't digressed into the equivalent of youtube's comment section but reading comments like yours makes me reconsider. Pathetic comments like yours are destroying what was once a great community.
dang 9y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do this, so would you please read and scrupulously abide by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on?

avar 9y ago

And now in the coming decades you get to watch the slow process of people becoming increasingly nostalgic about Holden cars as survivor bias ensures that only the best specimens survive. "Look at that old Holden! Hasn't needed a repair once in 30 years, not like these shitty foreign imports you get today!".

vwcx 9y ago
And the same process will occur with the memories of their jobs. In X years, a politician will harken back to the days of a strong local economy where high-quality products were produced internally and provided a living wage. Slogans will be created ("MAGA" works in Australia) and campaigns will be run. Nostalgia and lies are tricky bedfellows.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I mean, it seems hard to disagree that things were better in Rust Belt cities before deindustrialization. You might quibble about why it happened or what should be done about it but Detroit went from being a beautiful, world-class city to a byword for crime and urban decay within living memory and plenty of smaller cities are worse off.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Hm? Detroit ungentrified, housing became affordable, artist communities flourished, over-policing went away, corrupting corporate influences and (especially) real estate developers vanished. Detroit is everything every growing liberal city claims to want and writes public policy to work towards.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Yeah, that doesn't sound like an argument I actually want to engage with.
    - nate_meurer 9y ago
      Wasn't there a bankruptcy in there somewhere? > "corrupting corporate influences and (especially) real estate developers vanished" ... and were replaced with a level of government corruption (and incompetence) that would have been funny if it weren't so sad.

sofaofthedamned 9y ago

This is just like the death throes of the Rover MG models in the UK. In 1999 (or thereabouts) I was sick of being run off the road on my motorbike and decided to buy a car. Being an IT contractor with silly Y2K rates going on, I had plenty of disposable cash. First dealer was Toyota, Bill Allen's of Cheltenham. The salesman looked at me, decided I didn't have money then completely ignored me. Nice. Second was an MG garage whos name escapes me. Literally every car was was wrong - either the doors didn't fit, or there was a clunk when they closed, or in one case they didn't bother fitting the rear brake light (internal) correctly and it fell off during the test drive. I have never seen such a rubbish car in my life, literally each one I saw looked like it had been built on a Friday afternoon. No wonder they went bust. Another anecdote: My boss at the time was awesome and from Birmingham, right next to the Rover/MG plant. He asked me to do a speech for his wedding anniversary, so I went along to a social club next door to the factory. I noticed there were hardly any of their own cars in the employee car park, it was all Ford, Mazda, etc. This tells its own tale, at a time where 'Buy British and save Rover' was trumpeted everywhere.

mattmanser 9y ago
Those cars were trash, worse they even looked like a bad Ford rip-off, which are themselves cheap looking cars any way.
- wbillingsley 9y ago
  I had a mini, which was a very unique and fun design, and once had a Rover Metro as a temporary car while our car was in the garage -- also a vey fun car to drive and solid as anything. Supposedly, the problem Rover hit was though their last-developed large car (Rover 75) was very good and reasonably popular, since they'd been pulled away from working with Honda by the sale to BMW, they had neither a modern middle-sized car nor a replacement for the Metro. Put that together with being passed from hand-to-hand (from BAe to BMW was 6 years, BMW to Phoenix another 6, and Phoenix lasted another 5) in an industry struggling from overproduction, and it was always problematic. Whenever Citroen, GM, etc have gone bust, their respective governments have always stepped in. Competing in a loss-making industry against government-backed competitors is one tough game.

azernik 9y ago

Note that it's not just Holden that went under - foreign car companies (Toyota, for example) also have closed their local plants, despite probably very different workplace cultures. It's probably more to do with a small local market, and strong exports of raw materials (and hence a strong currency) making imports more competitive.

stephenr 9y ago
Holden was a foreign car company, no different than ford or Toyota. The only difference is Toyota models are just imported from elsewhere because they have a mostly global product line. Ford and GM Holden now need to find either European or North American models to import that will suit the local market.
- tomhoward 9y ago
  One of Ford Australia's replacements for the Falcon (the Australian-built middle-of-the-road large family/commercial sedan [1]), is the Mustang, so in the past few years we've seen an influx of these American muscle-cars onto Australian roads. They're not quite to my taste, but hey each to their own. The other replacement is the European-built Mondeo, which is much more like the Falcon and far less offensive IMO. [1] https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/ford/falcon/ https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/ford/falcon/
  - sundvor 9y ago
    The safety record of the Mustang is horrid. Absolute shit engineering. You'd have to be rather silly to buy one: http://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/releases/ford-mustang-scores-concerning-2-star-safety-rating-3aaab9 http://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/releases/ford-must...
    - b0b10101 9y ago
      Safety isn't everything you know. The lowest scoring component (Safety Assist for stuff like speed assistance systems, lane support systems etc...) is basically about removing control from the driver and considering the target demographic for the Mustang, it makes not having them make sense. Some cars are made to be enjoyed and "safety" is increasingly compromising that concept.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jackvalentine 9y ago

> I remember as a student/early graduate (so, 2000 - 2003ish) having.. acquaintances who were in their early 20's, bringing home close to $AUD100K/year, for assembling commodores. This figure likely included a lot of overtime - the average annual salary at the Elizabeth plant was only $60,000 according to Senator Kim Carr.

scriptman 9y ago
When annual salaries get reported in this context, you have to watch for the pea and the thimble trick where they take the base hourly rate and multiply that by standard hours to arrive at the annual salary, but nobody actually gets paid this amount. This is because the base rate leaves out all of the various loadings that are applied under different circumstances. There are so many circumstances for loadings that the base rate becomes meaningless. Overtime is only one way to get paid more than the base rate. Also, overtime becomes a meaningless word when you can get overtime just for working slightly non-standard hours, as opposed to working extra hours. The agreements are written in a way that makes it really hard to calculate what a worker is actually likely to get paid annually. The only way to be certain is to look at the worker's group certificate for tax purposes. So, while what Senator Carr said was probably technically correct, it was also meaningless since I would suggest that no worker was actually paid that amount in a year. It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  I think my point is the same as yours - that you can't take figures reported on face value. > It would be more meaningful to ask what the average amount on a worker's group certificate was. I think a better figure yet would be the average amount per FTE.
  - scriptman 9y ago
    You are right that per FTE is probably a better measure technically, but this just leaves the unions a loophole: they can just classify workers as something other than FTE. They are very clever at finding these sorts of loopholes and exceptions. What they can't do though is lie to the tax office. That crosses a threshold from being misleading to being illegal. There is a big incentive for unions to be misleading about what their members are paid. It's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from the public when the average member of the public is paid a lot less than the average union member. That's not to say that this is always the case - the wages, agreements and marketing to the public by the unions varies significantly between unionised industries.

mc32 9y ago

How is it that smaller countries like Malaysia and Taiwan can support their own native car industry (while also importing foreign cars) but Australia can't? Are the tariffs just not as high to effectively subsidize their local car industry? To add. I think those counties understand that the car industry helps to invigorate many other parts of the economy, so it's sad to see AUS let that go like that.

stephenr 9y ago
Good question. Maybe lower salaries for factory workers.
JimmyAustin 9y ago
A combination of labour costs, being the most isolated country on earth and a tiny local market. Malaysia's GDP per capita is <20% of Australias (49k vs 9k), and the population is 30% bigger (30mil vs 24mil), not to mention the surrounding local markets (Thailand at 68 mil, Vietnam at 92.7mil).
- stephenr 9y ago
  Thailand taxes all imported cars at something like 120%. (So a 50K car becomes a 110K) to encourage the local industry.
- jen729w 9y ago
  Enormous import tax rates! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_motor_vehicle_import_duties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_motor_vehicle_import...
adrianratnapala 9y ago
If a particular indsutry lacks comparative advantage in some country (in this case Australia) it only stands to reason that others do have comparative advantage in it. So you we can speculate why, in a complicated world, the (cars, Australia) paring works badly while the (education, Australia) and (cars, [South!] Korea) pairings work well and the (cars, Taiwan) paring is somewhere in between. But an important answer behind all of these is: The market speaketh thus.

WalterBright 9y ago

There's even a Trabby museum in Berlin. http://www.trabi-museum.com/home http://www.trabi-museum.com/home

scriptman 9y ago

The labour unions were unwilling to compromise to stay competitive with international factories. I was surprised when it was reported that Toyota wanted to reduce the Christmas shutdown period from 21 days to 10 days in line with other international factories and the union rejected this. This was in the context of other car manufacturers shutting down in Australia at the time and they had to know that this attitude was risking Toyota leaving as well, but they just couldn't accept a reduction in any conditions. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toyotas-altona-plant-to-start-21day-shutdown-amid-survival-fears-20131217-2zj05.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/toyotas-altona-plant-to-st...

sgift 9y ago
While I'm not sure that this is a great example for it there's always the matter of deciding if any job is really better than no job - sure, you could stay competitive with other places/countries by matching ever worse conditions, but is that really a good idea? Is a job which doesn't pay someone a living wage really a job that should exist?
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > Is a job which doesn't pay someone a living wage really a job that should exist? Should people who have other means of support be allowed to hold jobs?
- scriptman 9y ago
  I think you've moved the goal posts a long way there. A living wage as defined by the Harvester judgement, which seems to be what you are referencing, was based on begin paid enough money to be able to afford food, shelter and clothing for a family. In the case I'm referencing the dispute is over whether the workers should have their standard break for Christmas reduced from 21 days to 10 days. I can't think of any other companies within Australia that offer such a generous Christmas break, but maybe there are some; i think it would be a very small number. What they were being asked to give up seemed very generous and the replacement of 10 days instead doesn't seem onerous - it still seems generous compared to many companies. You'd have to ask the workers that lost their jobs if they are now better off having lost their jobs rather than stay competitive with other places by bringing their conditions in line with what is typical even within the country they live in.