A former cabinet minister argued Australia could have been making its own electric vehicles if manufacturers had received more support from the government.
Former Labour industry minister Kim Carr, now a professional fellow at Monash University, said a fully electric Holden Commodore could have been built locally.
His comment comes as Australia becomes increasingly reliant on foreign imports and Chinese cars now account for 80 per cent of Australia’s electric vehicle market.
Mr Carr said vehicles, such as the hydrogen-powered Toyota, could have been made if car manufacturing still existed in Australia with government subsidies.
“I have no doubt we could have built hydrogen cars,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The industry would have evolved as we laid the groundwork for that evolution. In fact, there was a green vehicle innovation fund project to produce an electric Commodore.’
Manufacturing the vehicles would have only cost taxpayers $300 million a year.
Carr argued that things would have been very different if the previous coalition government a decade ago had not complained to General Motors in the US about the cost of keeping Holden as a local manufacturer.
Australia could be making electric cars instead of importing them from China if it hadn’t made a grave mistake a decade ago, says a former minister (pictured, a BYD stamp)
In December 2013, newly elected Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he wanted Holden to remain in Australia, but added that his government would not “chase them down the road waving a blank check”.
That same day, Holden chief executive Mike Devereux told a Productivity Commission hearing that the GM unit was unsure of its future in Australia but wanted to stay.
But Abbott said Australia’s former carmakers and unions were to blame for the demise of the local manufacturing industry.
“We would still be making cars if car companies had better integrated their local operations into global ones, and if unions had not been so concerned about improving productivity,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
‘There are sometimes reasons to do marginally uneconomic things in the overall national interest, especially with defence industries, but Labour’s idea that we can subsidise our way to prosperity is simply absurd.’
In October 2017, Holden built its last car in Adelaide, a year after Ford and Toyota closed their Victorian factories.
A decade ago, Toyota made a gasoline-electric hybrid Camry sedan in Australia, with subsidies from the federal government’s former green car innovation fund, as it exported more cars from Melbourne than it sold locally.
“It was a very successful export industry,” Carr said.
In October 2017, Holden built its last car in Adelaide, a year after Ford and Toyota closed their Victorian factories.
“It’s a shocking, shocking loss of national sovereignty,” Carr said.
Mr Carr, who was aligned with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union as a Labor senator for Victoria, rejected the idea that car plant workers in Australia had been overpaid.
He said that in 2013, when he was still a cabinet minister, auto plant workers received an average salary of $70,000, which at the time was below the average full-time salary of $74,760, citing departmental data when he was minister. .
