Even if your government dumped a metric fucktonne of money on them to try to keep Ford and GM there, that's not going to solve the real underlying problem. As I said in the thread last spring:
News flash, GM isn't too happy about the supplier issue in .AU right now either. I wouldn't be surprised at all if GM pulls the eject handle on Aussie production in the next 5 years.
The problem isn't 'not enough financial blandishments or investments' per se, it's your local unions being ridiculous and disrupting the supply chain or worse putting suppliers out of business. Again, reposts with citation links:
In this case, they are to at least some degree. They have been agitating at various .AU suppliers of Ford, demanding higher wages and there's just no room to give - so the .au suppliers are going bankrupt and closing up shop instead. So instead of some jobs for some wages, they're getting no jobs and no wages and Ford can't rely on their local suppliers. Some of these suppliers are so on the edge that they can't even make their rent any more. And the unions demand more money - blood from a turnip, anyone?
Case in point:
http://www.news.com.au/national/car...closes-factories/story-fndo4cq1-1226434919109
If you can't rely on local suppliers in .au, why bother making cars there?
Ford and GM rely on the same general 'cloud' of suppliers in .au; this being a just-in-time manufacturing world where little to no inventory is kept at the factory, when you get strikes and such at the suppliers, Ford or GM has to idle a plant, costing them millions of dollars a day unless they can find some alternate supply.
The closest suppliers to pick up the slack for the lack of Australian suppliers would be in China, so why bother going to the expense of shipping parts from China to Australia only to ship them back to China (or the rest of mainland Asia) when you can just make the vehicles in China in the first place? Even if you take into account
{the taxes} imposed on imported vehicles, it might be cheaper and certainly easier to just import from Asia to Australia than deal with the situation needed to produce cars in Koalaland.
In any case, the time to be making 'investments' for the government, if you think such things should be done, is now well past. The ones the Labor government did make were ill-targeted; they shoveled cash at Ford and (presumably) GM and it didn't do much of anything. The people they
should have been shoveling cash at (again, if you think the shoveling was a good idea) were the local suppliers that produced components for Ford and GM so they could withstand the ever-escalating union wage demands despite razor-thin margins. But, they didn't and now it is far too late. There isn't anything the newly-empowered Liberals can do at this point - and Labor demonstrably couldn't do anything about it either, even when they were running the show. The suppliers are
gone and they won't be coming back until the unions decide to be reasonable. Perhaps (and now probably) not even then.
I am sure the factories could be retooled for new models, but since they can't rely on local suppliers it doesn't make economic or logical sense to continue operations there. It's not just the factories that are important but the companies that make the parts that the factories use, and those are the ones that got screwed in Australia.
The *best* that could happen would be those plants assembling CKD kits from other countries at this point.
Edit:
Only 82172 vehicles produced last year, that's not alot...
To put that in perspective, the local GM plant down the road from me in Arlington (just one factory) churned out
over 275,707 Tahoes/Suburbans/Yukons/Escalades last year.