Ofcourse we need manufacturing. It's the skills you need to maintain. Elitest comments like only high tech etc will get us just further down the drain.
Who wants china building the hulls of our battleships! Ffs there's an even chance they will be firing shells at us sometime in our lifetime.
Corporate, government, union and consumer greed has got us in this predicament and us Australians are pathetic as consumers. Go to Japan or Germany and try and buy a foreign TV set or car. They are parochial as. Labour is very expensive in Germany and their a manufacturing powerhouse and guess what? They subsidies there car industry! Because the assembly of the automobile provides jobs for unskilled. And the second and third teir industries that supply the car industries provide many many more unskilled and skilled jobs and apprentices. Tool making shops continually employed making dies etc.
Those that think hi tech is the way to go? How will we be when a clever Doctor invents the everlasting artificial heart from unobtainium and needs it designed , machined and assembled in AU where will he go if all the clever tool makers and designers don't exist because we don't have industries to train them on mass! When he takes that to China to make it will be copied and the market gone in a few years. Just like Apple will eventually lose to Chinese phones and every other industry that chose to manufacture in China will do.
Germany has a high level of government subsidy for SME's through things like the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer Society), an independent nongovernmental organization that provides high-quality, short-term, affordable applied research that small and medium-size firms could not otherwise afford. Fraunhofer enables smaller manufacturers to continually upgrade their processes and products, and keep ahead of the competition. The government funds 2/3 of its US$2.75billion budget. Imagine and AU government doing that? Aussie firms are having to fund their own R&D.
But the dominant manufacturers are high tech/ high quality niche suppliers not mass market suppliers. Yes there are are a few exceptions but even Mercedes are making cars in China now (Beijing Benz assembles and manufactures the Mercedes-Benz E-Class (long wheelbase), C-Class, and GLK-Class in China). The majority of those German companies are exporting components to the rest of the world including Asia. - Where they're bolted together.
So again, a focus on value add design and build vs component assembly.
The other thing Germany and Japan have going for them is a huge internal market compared to Australia (and via the EU for Germany getting access to 600 million people)
And to moan about China copying ignores history. Germany kickstarted its industrial revolution by importing English machine tools. Remember the saying from the 80's? The English design something, the yanks mass market it, and the Japanese make it smaller.
It's also not just a matter of being parochial. The two countries with the most successful post WW2 economies (Geemany and Japan) were the two that weren't allowed,or were severely restricted in spending on their armies. The government money went on rebuilding and investing in their manufacturing capability.
Edit: this is all purely opinion and should not constitute financial advice or long term government planning
