Car industry policy: the podcast

James O’Loghlin had me on his Sunday night show which was broadcast on ABC local radio tonight. In fact it would have been, but because of the cricket only went out via live feed on the net. Anyway, it was quite a long interview – went for 20 odd minutes so we got through quite a lot of stuff about the history of the car industry and car industry policy. I posted my latest column on it here.

If you have the time I hope you will find it quite interesting as an application of ‘lateral economics’, which is to say economics using thoroughly traditional ideas, but with an eye to ways of using them that deviate from current obsessions – not that easy given the obsessiveness with which free trade is debated by economists and others. The podcast is here.

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fxh
fxh
12 years ago

Thankfully – those broadcasts also usually go out on local DAB+ instead of sport. I only have DAB+ now on three radios.

Which is good and bad.

Good – as in I avoid sport and bad – as in its often repeats or pap from Sydney.

kelly liddle
12 years ago

If there is to be some protection it must at least have some logic to it. Providing protection to make Australia more poor in a very direct sense whilst at the same time encouraging buying products overseas is stupid. So protecting large cars like the Falcon and Commodore is actually buying overseas oil and increasing Australian debt when if you truely want to protect Australia buying a small car from overseas preferably running on LPG or natural gas will leave more money in Australia and therefore more jobs and money here. I have done a post on this in my blog which gives some rough figures and also points about general wealth transfers from the northern states to the southern states.

Another point to make which was touched on about the size of our market. Our market is quite a bit larger than most people realise with Thailand and South Pacific being on better or the same terms when compared to any competitors. With Mike Devereaux he distorts the truth about Thailand inferring that somehow our exports get different treatment when they get exactly the same treatment as any Thai built vehicle. The fact is our companies do not market our large vehicles there to compete with Mercedes or BMW and do not offer different engine options and this is there own fault because they have a major competitive advantage over the European cars due to no import duties.