Holden on for a rough ride ahead

Thank goodness those appalling Holden “We’re here to stay" ads have gone away. They were a terrible way to rub salt into the gaping wound of the company’s announcement it would cease manufacturing in Australia and they should never have been allowed to offend our eyes and ears.
Whether the ad buy has intentionally run its course or if community backlash to the ads caused the cessation of them from our screens and radios (hopefully the latter), doesn’t ultimately matter, the good thing is they’re gone (or at least I haven’t been subjected to them lately).

The wheels of change can turn rather fast, as we’ve seen in relation to Holden’s decision to depart the Australian car manufacturing scene.

South Australia will remember all too well when Mitsubishi made the call way back in February 2008 to pack its bags and cease Australian production at its South Australian headquarters at Tonsley Park in March of that same year. Hundreds lost their jobs as a result.

Earlier last year Ford announced it could no longer hold back the dam wall and as we now know, its fiercest and most traditional rival, Holden, has succumbed. Only Toyota remains and there is little belief that it will be able to do any more simply hang on until facing the seemingly inevitable demise of its Australian manufacturing operations also.

Coming from working in state and federal governments with a voracious appetite for jobs creation in the face of trying economic pressures, the loss of industry and huge jobs fallout is a deeply distressing blow.

I feel for those people who will have their lives turned upside down and who will now face enormous personal and financial pressure as a result, and I feel for the communities and businesses this will further impact.

GM Holden Chairman Mike Devereux quite neatly summed up the decision being made on the back of a “perfect storm of negative influences the automotive industry faces in the country, including the sustained strength of the Australian dollar, high cost of production, small domestic market and arguably the most competitive and fragmented auto market in the world.”
I can accept that.
However I still can’t accept from Holden, the audacious advertising campaign with its vision of regular people in irregular places, spliced with seemingly pointless shots of Australian sports stars (perhaps in a misguided attempt to imbue some sense of patriotism) – all to reassure us that Holden is here to stay.

Just as Mitsubishi did back in 2008 with its pursuit of a “full import strategy”, Holden badged its decision as a “transition to a national sales” manoeuvre, and just as with Mitsubishi in 2008, everyone knows what that really means on the ground – deep job cuts.

So why try this on? No-one I’ve spoken to at work, in media circles and in social circles rates the ad because no-one finds it convincing or believable.

Quite rightly, most of the people I’ve spoken to are more interested in what the next frontier is for those that will be jobless because of the manufacturing shutdown.

To that point, I heard Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane on radio being interviewed after Holden’s announcement, and while I can see merit in some of what he said, he also had me raising an eyebrow at times.

While he is right that the Australian market is no longer big enough to solely or even mostly sustain profitable automobile manufacturing operations here, especially in the current economic climate, he was completely unconvincing regarding his government’s ability to protect the future and pave a way forward by finding new and innovative industries.

All throughout the week of Holden’s announcement Macfarlane came across as being either at-odds with his robust Treasurer Joe Hockey, or out of touch with his position. Either way, the end result was Australians being sent a direct message that their government representatives weren’t even on the same page as each other, dashing any hope that there was a strategic plan to resolve the issue.
And while Macfarlane is right to say he is now putting his energies into focusing on new transition industries so that displaced workers will have new jobs to pursue – jobs of the future – talking about the need for innovation is far easier than actually creating policies and an environment that actually delivers it.

The Coalition for example, has questioned climate change science, has put onerous policy burdens around new and innovative industries involving clean energy (think wind farms), is committed to repealing the carbon price which is designed to stimulate new innovation and has announced a new review of the Renewable Energy Target less than a year after the previous government responded to the last one. And this is just looking at a snapshot of a microcosm of government operations as an example.

That it is the government actually stifling innovation, new job creation and environmental benefits – quite the trifecta – can hardly engender much hope that we’re in safe hands.

For all its woes, the Federal Labor Government since 2007 steered the country through arguably the most challenging global economic period since the Great Depression of the 1930s when the Global Financial Crisis hit, and despite concerns from some quarters with its methodology and delivery, Australia emerged from the downturn in good health compared to other major economies.

So the current Abbott Government will be hard pressed to truly convince most objective Australians that the current economic circumstances it’s inherited are of the magnitude and complexity as what was posed to the former government and what they could have been had we not navigated the GFC so well.

I hope the current government is ready to get down in the trenches and do the hard work to preserve jobs where it can and to deliver what Macfarlane purports to be working on – jobs of the future. We need new industries, new technology, better products, more innovation and Australian ingenuity leading the way to better job creation and a greater overall community benefit.

Unfortunately experience has shown these things are too easy for governments to say and too hard for them to follow-through on and deliver.