Kev splashed out with some small change yesterday, by way of a $35 million gift to Toyota to prop up the local car making industry which industry minister Kim Carr (unfortunate coincidence of names) lauded with the extra and rather dubiuous comment that making cars also gives this country the capacity to make fighter planes!
Kev backed up his minister by mumbling something about leading a country that makes things, unfortunately both pollies need to understand that assembling a product out of mixture of imported and local components isn’t the same as manufacturing something from the ground up. Now in our sophisticated times there is plenty of scope for diversifying supply, but if Kim and Kev are serious about making stuff, rather than just making stuff up, they probably need to do some more homework by way of history. Australia used to have a reasonably large manufacturing industry but it sat behind a wall of tarrifs. It was good for jobs and it gave us a sense of self reliance but it was a hindrance to the new world economic order. Kev’s sentiments are noble, Kim’s claim is rather ambit and the pair of them look a little silly when you look at the substance of what’s going on.
Dennis Phillips blogs over at the ABC about America’s energy independence. It’s a political document that seems to suggest that energy independence is something evil in the scheme of things, that should the US suddenly stop consuming vast quantities of an ever diminishing resource, the world as we know it will collapse. As a couple of his responders have observed, the politics of the oil economy are very different to the science and technology of alternative transport and energy. Using Kev’s hybrid as an example, if petrol hits say $4 a litre by 2010 (2 years away when the hybrid camry rolls of the line) then filling it up with 50 litres of fuel is going to set you back $200. But by investing in the car and the petrol fuel you remain locked in to more of the same, so when petrol hits $8 litre you are paying $400 to swan around in the leather seats and listen to your CD’s whilst trundling along to work.
On the other hand Kev and his cronnies could be pushing the researchers into developing some of the alternatives to oil that we currently have, solar and wind for energy and maybe algae for hydrocarbon creation. If they really want to lead a country that makes stuff, we need to stop hankering for the days when we considered a defective US car design transplanted into this country as something to be proud of and start looking at what new ideas are coming up to help this country deal with the realities of a world running out of oil and in serious danger of cooking itself. Instead of building lego cars out of bits and pieces from everywhere else, where all the intellectual propery is overseas we should get of our arses and make the things we really need, alternatives to petrol and energy sources that are sustainable over the next few centuries.
