By Samantha Hayes
Toyota has announced it will axe 350 jobs at its Melbourne plant in the next 10 weeks.
Now there are concerns the car assembly industry in Australia may be on the verge of collapse.
The government props up car manufacturers with hundreds of millions of dollars, but the high Aussie dollar has caused huge production cuts.
Workers were wished happy New Year by Toyota’s Australian president yesterday, then told 350 jobs were to be slashed -10 percent of the plant’s workforce.
The redundancies will be forced, not voluntary, and are being blamed on falling international demand for Australian Toyotas because of the high dollar.
There are fears job losses could snowball through the rest of the car manufacturing industry, which supplies parts to Toyota, putting thousands more jobs at risk.
“Obviously the effects that this is going to have on the local area and broader area, Australia is a fact, is going to be a huge issue,” says Leigh Diehm, of the Manufacturing Workers Union.
Taxpayers have injected more than $100 million into Toyota in the past four years, and it has no intention of removing subsidies as the opposition is proposing.
“That will lead to the collapse of the industry. That will lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of Australian jobs,” says Manufacturing Minister Kim Carr.
In New Zealand, car assembly plants started closing in the 1980s when the government lowered tariffs on imported vehicles, making it cheaper to import already assembled cars.
As local assembly companies started to close so did others that made component parts like radios and windscreens and by the end of the 1990s the industry no longer existed.
Australian car manufacturing may be heading in the same direction.
This year Toyota Australia plans to make 95,000 cars, 40 percent fewer than its peak production five years ago.
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