The bigger picture

The automotive industry as it exists in any country carries political ideas about three things: how things get made, how people move, and what role the state plays in industry. None of those questions has ever had a neutral answer. The Australian automotive industry has been shaped by political answers developed offshore, transmitted into Australia through manufacturing investment, trade agreements, and consumer culture.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing in prison in the 1930s, observed that the automobile industry operated as a political project, not just a way of making things. The factory floor, the production line, the regulation of the worker's body and time, the standardisation of consumer choice, were all political achievements that reached far beyond the car itself. Gramsci called the political form that emerged from this Fordism, after the American industrialist Henry Ford, and the analysis is still useful for reading what Australian automotive workers, dealers, and customers inherited.

The colonial transfer

Australia did not have an indigenous automotive industry in the early twentieth century. The cars on Australian roads were imported, mostly from Britain and the United States, until the post-war period. The decision to develop a domestic automotive industry, taken at federal level in the 1940s, was a political decision about national industrial policy, with commercial consequences flowing from the political settlement rather than the other way around.

The Australian Holden, launched in 1948 as the result of a partnership between General Motors and the Australian government, was a political artefact as much as a vehicle. The political idea that Australia should manufacture its own cars was tied to broader political ideas about employment, defence industrial capacity, immigration policy, and national development. The Italian, Greek, Yugoslav, and Maltese migrants who staffed Australian car factories in Adelaide, Geelong, and Broadmeadows were the workforce of a political project, not just an industry.

Toyota established Australian operations in the 1960s, Mitsubishi in the 1980s. The political settlement that supported these arrivals included tariff protection, local content rules, and government incentive structures that were sustained for decades. The industry's modern Australian shape was the result of these political settlements.

Post-war mass motorisation and the road-based settlement

The decision to centre Australian cities and regional life around the private car was political through and through. The American urbanist and political writer Mike Davis spent his career documenting how the suburban-car settlement, developed in postwar Los Angeles and exported across the world, restructured cities, labour markets, and political subjectivity in lasting ways. Australian cities followed the American template more closely than most. Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth all expanded outward into car-dependent suburbs, with public transport investment systematically deprioritised in most periods.

The political settlement that put cars at the centre of Australian life produced the conditions for the automotive industry's most prosperous decades. Mechanics, dealers, parts suppliers, and trainers across the country built businesses on the political fact that ordinary Australians needed cars to live their lives. The industry's continuing political conversation with state governments about roads, parking, and infrastructure is the legacy of that settlement 

Public transport politics is automotive politics in reverse. State decisions to invest or disinvest in train, tram, and bus infrastructure shape who needs cars and how often. The political deprioritisation of public transport in most Australian states for most of the twentieth century operated as a political settlement that benefited the automotive industry, road builders, oil companies, and outer-suburban developers, and politically disadvantaged inner-city residents, working-class commuters, women without licences, and people with disability.

The deindustrialisation moment

The political settlement that built the Australian automotive manufacturing industry also produced its dismantling. From the 1980s, federal political ideas shifted. The Lima Declaration on industry policy, the Button Plan, the Hawke-Keating reforms, and successive tariff cuts produced political conditions that made domestic car manufacturing increasingly difficult. By 2017, when Holden, Toyota, and Ford all closed their Australian plants, the political settlement that had built the industry had been comprehensively unwound.

The dismantling was itself a political achievement, contested at the time and contested again now. The thousands of automotive workers in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Geelong who lost jobs were the workforce of a political project ending. The political legacy of the deindustrialisation moment continues to reach automotive workers, their families, and their communities in ways the industry's commercial press rarely names.

The present moment

The climate transition, geopolitical supply chains, and right-to-repair politics are reshaping the automotive industry now. All three reach Australia from elsewhere.

The climate transition arrives through the political idea that internal combustion vehicles must be replaced by electric ones, an idea won by decades of climate movement organising, environmental science, and policy advocacy, much of it global rather than domestic. The pace and pattern of the transition is being decided largely outside Australia, in Brussels, Beijing, Sacramento, and Tokyo, and Australian operators are absorbing decisions they did not make.

Geopolitical supply chain politics arrives through every parts order. Australian car parts now move through supply chains shaped by US-China relations, by manufacturing politics in Korea and Japan, by the Indian government's industrial strategy, and by the politics of the rare earth minerals and battery components without which modern vehicles cannot be built.

Right-to-repair politics arrives through manufacturer technology control. Independent workshops in Australia are increasingly locked out of certain repairs by manufacturer software protocols developed offshore. The political question of whether car owners and independent repairers have rights against manufacturer technology gates is moving slowly in Australia and faster elsewhere.