Rebuild our manufacturing?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the Prime Minister's latest "plan". (It seems he has a "plan" for everything.)

Now he is trying to tell us that, along with business, we can become a great manufacturing "powerhouse" again. This can happen although we now only manufacture a quarter of what we did in 1960.

Even though I was a mere kitten I can remember manufacturing in this state. The Senior Cat would always try to avoid travelling along the main road into the CBD if there was a change of shift at "Holden's". They made cars there and they employed a lot of people, almost all of them men. They were mostly the sole breadwinners for their families.  It was interesting to watch them leave work but we were warned that working hard in school was the way to avoid work like that. Our parents were not snobs, far from it, but they knew what factory work could be like.

Not far from there was the Actil plant which made bed linen and towels. I remember there was a food manufacturing plant of some sort on the other side of that road. In the area we lived in at the time there were "the sugar works" and "the cement works" and "the fish place" and the place that made the immense ropes which attached the ships to the wharves. The wharves were busy with the "wharfies" carting sacks of wheat and barley and wool into the hulls of ships. The wool had been "scoured" at a place just north of the CBD. It has all gone. Any big ships docking do so at the outer harbour and they are almost always tourist vessels. 

Move on and there were places where fruit was dried for export, jams were made for the bread which used the flour which was milled.  They still exist but in a much smaller way. One such place has just filed for bankruptcy. The oven-bake bread rolls my BIL likes come from France. 

We used to deal with the wool ourselves, some of the very finest wool in the world.  The last wool scourer in a neighbouring state closed halfway through this year. That leaves another facility much further north of our CBD to do the work but do it in a much more limited way.  Mulesing issues, drought issues and more have decimated the wool industry. Environmental activism has not helped. 

And then there are the unions with their endless demands for "better wages and conditions". They may represent just 13.9% of the workforce but they are still powerful. Many former high ranking unionists are now members of parliament. These people have simply priced us out of most world markets. Why pay twice or more as much when you can get the same thing in countries where the wages and living conditions are half as good?

We won't build high technology industry here. It needs more than reliable power and a reliable workforce. It needs the know how and the ability to pay for it to even start up. 

Unless we lower our financial and lifestyle expectations and are prepared to put in more hours per week rather than reduce them none of this will even start. Industry says we have fifteen years to do it but our school children are behind in not just STEM subjects but the language capacity to do those subjects. 

It is going to take a major revolution not just a Prime Minister with a "plan" to get anything done at all.