The Federal Government is regularly blackmailed into providing assistance for the Australian car making industry, hundreds of millions on the basis that the industry is strategically important. The real reason is the political poison that closure of a plant causes, as suddenly lots of voters are unemployed, and the support and component suppliers (and their voting employees) are in trouble.
Kim Carr is just the latest in a long line (a conga line?) of Industry Ministers to go to Detroit, only to find that the captains of the car industry do not really care about a modest market and manufacturing outpost that has no real strategic place in the global supply chain, and therefore is expendable. If Australians want to keep them open, here is the price!
What a difference to the processed food industry.
It employs just as many, probably more, and does have a genuine strategic role, feeding ourselves seems pretty strategic to me, but is more fragmented and therefore unable to point to individual electorates and predict disaster, so we just let it rot.
Hypocrisy, perhaps blind stupidity, of the first order.
