Toyota’s announcement that it is to stop making cars in Australia in 2017 was met with dismay this week – the final nail in the coffin of an industry that is being consigned to history.
That history began in the 1920s, when Ford – who had been importing vehicles like the Model T – first leased premises in Geelong to begin construction for the Australian market.
Around the same time, Adelaide car body maker Holden – which started as a saddle making business in the 1850s – joined forces with US automotive giant General Motors.
GM Holden became a company whose story would be forever linked to the lives of many first-generation Greek migrants who found their first employment with the car maker.
As the great US automotive companies established their Australian manufacturing plants, they nurtured a nationwide network of parts makers and suppliers, and the vehicles they created became part of our national identity – from the FJ and FX Holden to the Falcon GT-HO and Chrysler Valiant.
Toyota appeared later on the landscape, with the first Land Cruiser imports arriving for the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme in the late 1950s. In 1963, Toyota’s cars were rolling out of their production plant in Port Melbourne.
Today Toyota’s 4,000 employees are left pondering if the Coalition government’s stated vision, of creating thousands of new jobs in new industries to replace the old, can truly be realised.
Toyota’s workers are of course not alone. With Ford closing its operations in 2016, and Holden to shut up shop a year later, the thousands of direct lay-offs are the tip of an iceberg.
Tens of thousands of workers in the automotive supply industries – and the companies they work for – are faced with the task of reinventing themselves and the products they supply.
Toyota’s hands – like those of the other stricken car makers – have been forced by constantly reducing sales of locally produced models over the past six years.
This despite interventions from government – such as the $2 billion dollars given to Holden over the past 12 years to keep the Detroit-based company in Australia.
The Abbott government said enough was enough – in line with what its critics see as a self-defeating obsession with political ideology: allowing market forces to rule supreme at the cost of Australia’s traditional manufacturing industries.
Meanwhile, the unions, who have been implicated by Treasurer Joe Hockey as partly the cause of Toyota’s pull out (an accusation formally refuted by Toyota), are outraged by what they see as a government intent on decimating traditional manufacturing industries – with no credible plan for large-scale job creation.
“There’s a sense of resignation. We’re talking thousands and thousands of people involved – from little workplaces through to large ones. Now they have to consider their options.”
Mastrandonakis says the government’s track record in creating new jobs is laughable.
“If you look at the jobs they’re talking about – the majority of them are part-time casual jobs which will not fill any vacuum whatsoever. They consider a person who works four hours at Coles as employed. It’s ridiculous.”
As the AWU’s Metro Melbourne organiser, Mastrandonakis believes the Coalition’s stance has been at least partly responsible for Toyota’s announcement.
“Toyota has been a very successful company in Australia. They’ve exported 80 per cent of their cars, and that’s been a huge bonus for Australia,” he says.
Mastrandonakis believes that investment in new technology was key to sustaining Australia’s car manufacturing industry, and quite simply – the Abbott government doesn’t get it.
“We’re a small country fair enough, but it’s all about investment in new technology. If Toyota was willing to spend a huge amount of money on new technology, why as a country couldn’t we chip in, if that is going to create tens of thousands of jobs?
“We’re one of the only two countries in the G20 that doesn’t produce cars now. The other one is Saudi Arabia. It’s a joke.”
The union directly involved with Australia’s car manufacturing workforce is the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
AMWU national division secretary Mike Nicolaides told Neos Kosmos that the government’s philosophy – of the market governing the nature of Australia’s engineering and manufacturing industries – was out of kilter internationally.
“Their position seems to be ‘we get out of the way, and let the market rip’. That’s pretty naive,” says Nicolaides.
“That’s not an attitude that will let you have a diversified, modern economy and it’s certainly not the approach that middle European countries or North America have taken to diversify their engineering economies.
“It’s the sort of laissez faire approach that gave us the Global Financial Crisis.”
The debate over what conspired to make Toyota bring the curtain down on car making in Australia, the Coalition government’s reluctance to step in, and the nature of the federal government’s industry policies will continue – to the next election and beyond.
What politicians of all persuasions can agree on is that the absence of car manufacturing in Australia from 2017 is more than a dent to national pride. It is a tragedy for those whose livelihoods depend upon it.
