>>892712
Yep, and we only have mining and agricultural exports these days because we don't actually manufacture anything in this country any more.
Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey chose to kill the car industry by ending the relatively modest subsidies for car manufacturers that had been bipartisan policy for decades. And Abbott and Hockey did this knowing that Ford had already decided to leave because it couldn't make ends meet because the Australian dollar was so high on the back of a temporary mining boom that only benefited mining companies, which employ almost nobody, and which Abbott and Hockey happily subsidised to the tune of billions of dollars every year.
Toyota's factory in Adelaide was a massive investment, and so cutting-edge that there were documentaries made about it. I think Toyota had never before left a country it had built a factory in, but Abbott and Hockey got them to fuck off, along with Holden.
Then the Liberals shat themselves because they'd thrown thousands of South Australians out of work, so they then wasted billions of dollars trying to get all the car-industry workers they'd fucked over to build submarines that of course never got built.
And in Geelong, where the Ford plant was, the Liberals decided to waste hundreds of millions more to pay a Korean company to build self-propelled artillery units for the Australian army even though the army unequivocally said that it didn't want them and couldn't use them.
And we only have one petrol refinery in this country now. One.
We make fuck-all steel in this country. Most Australian iron ore is exported to places like China, where it is turned into steel using Australian coal, and then sold back to us at a massive mark-up.
It's all part of the long-term Liberal Party project to deindustrialise Australia because of their ideological hatred of trade unions. Factories have big, unionised workforces that have a lot of bargaining power when it comes to wages and conditions. The Liberal Party mission is to fragment and atomise the workforce so that everybody is on their own and can be exploited by the predatory rich cunts that the Liberal Party exists to represent.
It's the same story in most developed countries...