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Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

> If you sit on someone’s shoulders and forget that they’re doing most of the work, you can be shocked all you want when they collapse out from under you but nobody on the ground is going to have any sympathy at all for you.

Ajax Fasteners where a small manufacturer in the name of Division of Labour, and when they went into receivership, it took down Australia's entire car industry. Let me repeat - Australia no longer has a car industry.

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> Ajax Fasteners where a small manufacturer in the name of Division of Labour, and when they went into receivership, it took down Australia's entire car industry. Let me repeat - Australia no longer has a car industry.

Holy crap: https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1719988.htm

You'd think the car companies could have just bought the manufacturing assets of the supplier if it was this critical (that's assuming they weren't looking for a back door excuse to shut down their own Australian production, that is).

That was 2006. Australia had a car industry well after that. It died a slow death, I doubt you can blame it on one supplier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Austral...

It did died a slow death (about 7 years after Ajax), but IMHO it was the beginning of the end. There were a tonne of factors, including iron ore prices, trade tarrifs, the car industry crash in Detroit etc, but for us, I think Ajax shutting should have raise alarm bells that the end was nigh (rather than throwing hundreds of millions more to prop up foreign nations in the name of local jobs).

A good rule of thumb I have is if a politician is there at a ribbon cutting, and talks about jobs, then it's nothing more than vote buying in disguise.

Holy crap indeed

... but the Australian car industry was nothing more than rent seeking anyway, so it was a good thing we stopped funding a non-utility.

Do you think there was a moment when the utility stopped, or was it a process? I'm only really familiar with the last days of the Australian car industry.

I never thought that Australia having a car industry as a utility. When something is not economically viable, unless the government want to run it for social benefit at a loss rather than a for-profit cost center, then it's never going to be able to sustain itself over the long run

I looked up Ajax Fasteners to see if they made more than fasteners, and it seems like fasteners really were the bulk of their business. How can it possibly be true that there were no other suitable fastener suppliers in a country with massive mining, steel/aluminium production, and other heavy industries? It sounds like there's a story here.

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