I remember listening to politicians on a news talk show a few years ago talking about getting rid of Australian car manufacturing. They all agreed that we don’t need local manufacturing of cars, because you can just order what you want from overseas. It’s no big deal to let it go.
I was sitting there thinking, ‘You guys are idiots, don’t you understand how important it is for society to make products here if things go bad?’ If things go bad, then here in Australia, far away from the centres of world civilisation, we’ll struggle to get things elsewhere.
But these politicians couldn’t imagine things going bad. That’s probably because they, like most people, haven’t read a history book since high school. History shows civilisations always have inclines and declines, and the declines hit the most remote societies the hardest, especially with regards to accessing supplies from the centre of civilisation.
And here we are, just a few years after we stopped making cars in Australia, second-hand car prices are out of control because new cars are getting harder to get.
Our leaders are either incompetent, evil, or both. Because this was easy to see coming:
Toyota in Japan has suspended all LandCruiser 300 Series orders until further notice as customer wait times in the product’s domestic market now span years, not months.
The Japanese brand says global demand for its Nissan Patrol rival “greatly exceeds our production capacity”, and so it has taken the extreme step of suspending all new orders until it can catch up.
How long that will be is anyone’s guess, but given Japanese wait times are rumoured to be up to four years, it orders could be frozen for some time to come.
This was eminently predictable. If we had leaders with foresight they would never have let Australian manufacturing get so low, or reliance on overseas trade so high.
Indeed, it was so predictable one cannot help but view this as deliberate mismanagement. After all, fewer cars for sale here fits with the Climate agenda and moves people towards less independence, which fits with other global agendas.
Fun times are ahead. Part of me is looking forward to seeing how hard times change people. Australia has never really experienced hard times, but it appears we may be entering them. Be prepared.
