This Is Why Australia Killed Its Own Car Industry

Ajouté : 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]On the 29th of November, 1948, the very first Holden rolled off the assembly line at Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne.

[00:00:08]Prime Minister Ben Chifley stood beside it and called it a beauty.

[00:00:12]He was right. It was the start of something that would last 70 years.

[00:00:17]Australia would build its own cars, designed here, engineered here, pressed, welded, painted, and assembled here.

[00:00:25]Sold to Australians who drove them on Australian roads.

[00:00:29]Within four years, Holden controlled more than 50% of the new car market in this country. Ford followed, then Chrysler, then Toyota.

[00:00:40]By the early 1970s, Australia was producing nearly half a million vehicles every single year. The industry employed 100,000 people directly. Another 50,000 worked in the parts and supply chains that fanned out across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland.

[00:01:00]Entire suburbs were purpose-built around these factories. Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, was laid out in 1955 to house Holden workers. Broadmeadows in Melbourne grew up around Ford. Other towns included Geelong, Altona, Port Melbourne, Dandenong, and Acacia Ridge in Brisbane. These were not just industrial estates, they were communities.

[00:01:24]The man who worked the press shop knew the man who worked the paint line. Their wives knew each other. Their kids went to the same schools. The work was hot, loud, dangerous, and properly paid. A fitter at Holden in 1972 could afford a three-bedroom brick house on a quarter-acre block within walking distance of the plant on one [music] wage. This is what Australia had built, and this is what Australia would dismantle.

[00:01:50]The first sign of trouble came in 1973.

[00:01:54]The Whitlam Labor government, advised by economist H.C. Coombes, cut tariff protection on imported cars by 25% across the board. Overnight.

[00:02:06]The industry was shaken, but it survived. What came next was more dangerous because it was slower. Through the 1980s, the Hawke and Keating governments rolled out what became known as the Button Car Plan, named after industry minister Senator John Button.

[00:02:24]The plan did two things at once. It rationalized the industry, forcing the smaller players out, [music] and it gradually lowered tariffs from 57.5% down toward 15%.

[00:02:36]The argument was competitiveness.

[00:02:39]Australian cars needed to compete with imports on price.

[00:02:43]The cost was paid in jobs.

[00:02:46]Nissan Australia ceased manufacturing in 1992.

[00:02:50]Ford closed its Sydney plant. Mitsubishi closed its Lonsdale engine plant, then its Adelaide assembly plant in March 2008, taking around 1,000 jobs with it.

[00:03:02]Mitsubishi was the first major car maker to walk away. It would not be the last.

[00:03:09]Meanwhile, the Australian dollar climbed as the mining boom took hold. That made every Australian-made car more expensive to export. Tariffs kept falling.

[00:03:19]By 2010, they sat at 5%. Australia had gone from one of the most protected car markets in the developed world to one of the most open.

[00:03:29]Three car makers were still standing: Holden, Ford, [music] and Toyota, squeezed on every side.

[00:03:36]Then came the decision that killed them.

[00:03:40]In September 2013, Tony Abbott's coalition government took office.

[00:03:46]On the 18th of September that year, Joe Hockey was sworn in as Treasurer.

[00:03:51]Within weeks, Hockey stood up in Parliament and publicly challenged General Motors. He demanded that Holden announce its intentions, in [music] or out. He framed government support for the car industry as something Australia could no longer afford.

[00:04:06]He called it corporate welfare. He had a phrase for it.

[00:04:10]The end of the age of entitlement.

[00:04:13]The Productivity Commission, under the chairmanship of Peter Harris, released a position paper in December 2013 that backed Hockey's position. It did so without presenting any economic modeling to support its conclusions. The car industry was not judged on its strategic value, not on its 50,000 skilled workers, not on the supply chain depth, not on the question of what 50,000 tradesmen would do for work afterwards.

[00:04:40]It was judged purely on its short-term fiscal cost to the federal budget.

[00:04:46]On the 11th of December 2013, 10 days after the Productivity Commission's paper landed, General Motors announced that Holden would cease manufacturing in Australia. Eight weeks later, on the 10th of February 2014, Toyota announced that it would close, too.

[00:05:04]Ford had already announced its own closure on the 23rd of May, 2013.

[00:05:11]In the space of 9 months, the entire Australian car industry was condemned to death.

[00:05:16]The day Toyota announced its closure, Akio Toyoda, the head of Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan, called the decision simply heartbreaking.

[00:05:27]Prime Minister Tony Abbott, asked on the same day what would replace the lost jobs, gave an answer that workers in Adelaide, Geelong, Broadmeadows, and Altona would never forget.

[00:05:40]"While some jobs end," he said, "other jobs start." The implication that 50,000 skilled tradesmen would simply transition into other roles landed with a coldness that still echoes today.

[00:05:53]The Australian Council of Trade Unions estimated that 50,000 direct skilled jobs would be lost and $21 billion would be wiped from the economy.

[00:06:03]Industry analysts warned that the closure of the three major car makers would pull the supply chain down with them.

[00:06:11]120 parts manufacturers across the country would lose their primary customer.

[00:06:17]What followed was a 4-year funeral.

[00:06:21]Between 2014 and 2017, the industry walked toward its own grave. Ford closed its Geelong engine plant in September 2016 and its Broadmeadows assembly plant in October 2016, ending more than 80 years of Australian Ford production.

[00:06:40]600 direct jobs were lost at Ford alone.

[00:06:44]Toyota Altona closed on the 3rd of October 2017 with 2,700 workers walking out the gates for the last time.

[00:06:54]Some had worked there for 30 years. Some were the sons of men who had worked there for 30 years before them.

[00:07:01]Job pathways programs were launched.

[00:07:04]Retraining schemes were funded. And then came the final day.

[00:07:09]On the 20th of October 2017, a red Holden Commodore fire eight sedan rolled slowly off the production line at Elizabeth in South Australia.

[00:07:19]It was the last car ever made by Holden.

[00:07:22]The last car ever made by any major manufacturer in Australia. Around 940 workers remained at the plant on that final day. They watched the red Commodore move down the line in silence.

[00:07:35]Outside the factory gates, more than 1,000 Holden fans had gathered. They came from across the country in their old Commodores, Monaros, Toranas, Kingswoods, [music] and Utes. Some had driven from Perth. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said it was the end of an era. He was asked on radio by host Neil Mitchell [music] whether the government had blood on its hands.

[00:07:58]He refused to answer the question directly.

[00:08:01]The total output when the gate closed for the last time was 7.6 million Holdens, 5.9 million Fords, 3.4 million Toyotas.

[00:08:13]Nearly 17 million cars built in Australia by Australian hands across seven decades.

[00:08:20]None of them would ever be built here again.

[00:08:24]In October 2015, just two years after challenging Holden in Parliament, Joe Hockey gave his valedictory speech to the Parliament before resigning. In that speech, he listed his proudest achievements as Treasurer. Near the top of the list was this.

[00:08:40]The Abbott government, he said, had refused to write taxpayer-funded checks to Toyota, Holden, Qantas, or Coca-Cola Amatil.

[00:08:49]He was proud of it. The man who had played the central role in ending Australia's car industry framed it as a victory.

[00:08:57]Within two months, he was appointed ambassador to the United States.

[00:09:01]But the lion was not done dying.

[00:09:04]In February 2020, General Motors went one step further.

[00:09:09]The Holden brand itself, in any form, anywhere in the world, would be retired.

[00:09:14]Dealerships closed.

[00:09:17]The badge that had been the symbol of Australian motoring for over 70 years was killed off entirely.

[00:09:24]600 more workers were made redundant, including the designers and engineers at Fisherman's Bend who had been kept on to work on global General Motors products after the ended.

[00:09:37]Now look at what has happened since.

[00:09:40]A long-term study published in nature in 2025 tracked 4,261 retrenched automotive workers across five waves of surveys between 2020 and 2024.

[00:09:55]The picture it paints is grim. Many former auto workers ended up in lower paid casual work. Many faced persistent inflation, rising interest rates, and increased household costs that hit them harder because their wages never recovered. The job pathways programs were considered successful at reducing emotional distress. They were less successful at delivering equivalent work. Real unemployment in parts of northern Adelaide is estimated at 33% in working-class areas. Geelong, Broadmeadows, Altona, Dandenong, Elizabeth. Towns that were built around these factories now carry the longest shadows of their closure. And here is the part that hurts the most.

[00:10:39]In 2024, the world started building electric vehicles at a pace that nobody predicted 10 years earlier.

[00:10:47]New electric vehicle sales in Australia reached 114,000 units in 2024, up from 98,000 the year before.

[00:10:57]Every single one of those vehicles was imported.

[00:11:01]While Thailand passes laws requiring foreign car makers to build locally at a ratio of 1 to 2 by 2026, while Vietnam builds its own national electric vehicle champion called VinFast, while China dominates the global electric vehicle supply chain, Australia imports [music] everything.

[00:11:21]We have lithium in the ground in Western Australia. We have nickel and cobalt. We have the raw materials for battery sitting in our soil.

[00:11:31]We ship them overseas, watch them get turned into vehicles, and import the finished cars back at a premium.

[00:11:38]Australia [music] is one of only a handful of nations in the world that ever achieved full sovereign automotive manufacturing.

[00:11:46]The capability to design a car, engineer it, press the steel for its body, weld it together, paint it, fit its engine, assemble its interior, and export it to the world is gone.

[00:12:00]It cannot be rebuilt without decades of work, billions in investment, and political will that no government since 2013 has shown.

[00:12:09]The 50,000 skilled jobs are gone. The supply chain firms are gone.

[00:12:15]The training pathways that took young apprentices from Holden to Ford to General Motors and built generations of Australian engineers are gone.

[00:12:25]The dignity of skilled work passed from father to point is gone. Joe Hockey is no longer in politics. Tony Abbott is no longer in politics. Peter Harris no longer chairs the Productivity Commission.

[00:12:37]>> [music] >> The workers from Elizabeth, Broadmeadows, Altona, and Geelong still remember exactly what was said and exactly when it was said. They remember the day the announcement came. They remember the last shift. They remember the red Commodore rolling down the line in silence. They remember the words.

[00:12:57]While some jobs end, other jobs start.

[00:13:00]For some of them, [music] the other jobs never started.

[00:13:04]If you grew up around these factories or worked in them or drove a Falcon, a Commodore, a Hilux, a Camry that came out of one of those plants, you already know what was lost on the 20th of October 2017.

[00:13:19]It was not just an industry. It was a piece of the country itself.

[00:13:24]If you remember when Australia made its own cars, surprise and stay with the channel. There is more of this story [music] to come.