Australia is one of only a few countries in the world that has the facilities to design and manufacture a car from digging the raw materials out of the ground to dealer domestic sale. And in the 1970s Australia’s auto industry was ranked 10th place in the World but today? We are in 28th place.

Take this one example – The Ford Falcon, which has been manufactured since 1960 and is currently on life support. Sales last year were 74% less than its best year ever, which was in 2003.

Ford, which has about 3000 employees in Australia, has received an estimated $1 billion in government subsidies since 2000 in an effort to prop up an industry in decline.

The Labor government has committed $5.4 billion for car making from 2008 to 2020.

Meanwhile – the number of small businesses that went bankrupt last double increased by 48% – and none of them received government handouts. Why? My guess is because there aren’t any votes in it.

To explain why the government is spending billions of our dollars to prop up foreign-owned companies, I’m very pleased to be joined today on Skype, by Nicholas Gruen, all the way from San Francisco, who is a prominent Australian economist, the CEO of Lateral Economics, the Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion, the founding chairman of the Aussie start-up Kaggle, and a board member of Innovation Australia.

You can follow Nicholas on Twitter and check out his new start-up HealthKit.

 

Music:

Space MusicDyme Def
“Get Down” (mp3)
from “Space Music”
(Soul Gorilla Monopoly (SGM))

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