Passenger vehicle sales have bern around a million a year for several years, more than enough to support a local industry. What killed it was government policy, an extended, so sitting mining construction boom and mismanagement by Ford and GM, pure and simple. Pull any one of those factors out and the industry would not only have survived, it would have been profitable and ramped up significantly post mining boom.
For example VE commodore was specifically designed to be stretched and shortened as required to produce an even greater variety of models than the preceding VZ with its sedan, stretched sedan, wagon coupe, ute, 1 Tonne Ute, crew cab ute and AWD models. VE was the platform used for the reborn Camaro but back in Aus where Mooney replaced Hannenburger, after years of perfecting building niche models on a common line, the local line up was cut to the bone and guess what, sales dropped. Ford also was building niche models and also planned to start building Focus locally while the Australian designed and developed Ford Ranger was also a distinct possibility for local production.
What happened, well, mining construction boom, stacked un-productivity commission, GFC, brain dead anti local manufacturing free trade agreements (This built cars are sold in Aust with no tariff or specific sales tax while Australian cars sold in Thailand had a 100% sales tax), opening the Australian automotive market to dumping, including models that did not meet Australian design rules. Basically the local industry was exposed to over a decade of unfair competition from operators who did not need to follow the same rules while battling the effects of an unnaturally high dollar and the financial troubles of their parent organisations.
I am waiting for the cries of despair when not only the Korean cars, but Thai and Chinese ones become an unaffordable luxury once local production is totally dead and the dollar drops to more traditional levels.
