How Australia could have been building its own EVs – if it wasn’t for a major government error
A former minister has argued that Australia could have made its own electric vehicles if manufacturers had received more government support.
Former Minister for Labour Industries Kim Carr, who is now a professional fellow at Monash University, said an all-electric Holden Commodore could have been made locally.
His comments come as Australia becomes increasingly reliant on overseas imports, with Chinese cars now accounting for 80 percent of Australia’s EV market.
Mr Carr said vehicles such as a hydrogen-powered Toyota could have been made if car manufacturing still existed in Australia, with government subsidies.
“I have no doubt that we could have built hydrogen cars,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“The industry would have evolved when we laid the foundation for that evolution. There was even a project for a green car innovation fund to produce an electric Commodore.”
Manufacturing the vehicles would have cost taxpayers only $300 million a year.
Mr Carr argued that things would have been very different if the former coalition government had not complained to General Motors in the United States a decade ago about the costs of keeping Holden as a local manufacturer.
Australia could be producing electric cars instead of importing them from China if it hadn’t made a major blunder a decade ago, says a former minister (pictured with a BYD stamp)
In December 2013, recently elected Liberal Party Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he wanted Holden to stay in Australia, but added that his government would not “push them out with a blank cheque.”
That same day, Holden CEO Mike Devereux told a Productivity Commission hearing that the GM division was uncertain about its future in Australia but wanted to stay.
But Mr Abbott said Australia’s former carmakers and unions were responsible for the demise of the local manufacturing industry.
“We would still be making cars if the car companies had integrated their local operations better with their global operations, and if the unions hadn’t been so bloody enthusiastic about productivity improvements,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘There is sometimes a case for doing marginally uneconomic work in the broader national interest, particularly in the defence industry, but the Labour Party’s idea that we can subsidise prosperity is simply ridiculous.’
In October 2017, Holden produced its last car in Adelaide, a year after Ford and Toyota closed their factories in Victoria
Ten years ago, Toyota produced a petrol-electric hybrid Camry sedan in Australia, using subsidies from the federal government’s old Green Innovation Fund for Cars. Toyota exported more cars from Melbourne than it sold locally.
“It was a very successful export industry,” Mr Carr said.
In October 2017, Holden made its last car in Adelaide, a year after Ford and Toyota closed their Victorian factories.
“It is a shocking, shocking loss of national sovereignty,” Carr said.
Mr Carr, who served as a Labor senator for Victoria and was associated with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, rejected the idea that workers at car factories in Australia had been overpaid.
He said auto plant workers were paid an average of $70,000 in 2013, when he was minister, which was lower than the average full-time salary of $74,760 at the time, citing department data from when he was minister.