The closure of the Australian car manufacturing industry: redundancy, policy and community impacts

The Australian car manufacturing industry closed in the third quarter of 2017, bringing to an end 70 years of vehicle assembly as General Motors Holden, Ford and Toyota ceased large-scale production. This resulted in highly visible redundancies amongst the vehicle producers, and a more profound, but less noticeable, loss of employment within the supply chain. The likely impact on the affected communities will be profound, with northern Adelaide, the outer parts of Melbourne and the regional city of Geelong likely to bear witness to long-term worklessness for decades to come. This outcome, however, was not an inevitable consequence of market forces; instead, it was a product of the decisions of successive governments over more than 30 years, as well as the consequences of a global industry restructuring in the face of economic shock. This paper begins by situating the research within a new state spaces framework before sketching out the dynamics of the Australian car industry in the twentieth century, and moving on to consider the institutional and policy factors that contributed at the national level to change.