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To that, add the local carmaker burning hard-to-get engineering dollars on projects that go nowhere. It's hard to believe now, but you don't have to rewind far to find Ford Australia in a very different place.
Go back just eight years, to the start of 2004, and the company had a lot to look forward to. It's BA Falcon, after a year in the market, had turned around dismal demand for the ugly AU model and ended 2003 selling more than 73,000.
It was taking share from the Holden Commodore and was even the best-selling car one month. That figure doesn't include all the different Falcons available then. As well as a ute, there were Fairlane and LTD long-wheelbase luxury models and a station wagon. And there was the new Territory SUV.
Years before, the company decided it needed a second model to keep its factory busy and it made the right choice. The Territory arrived just as the SUV boom was taking off and the large car slide looked inevitable. In the first six months it sold more than 13,000 -- almost double the rate of today.
Ford Australia finished 2004 delivering nearly 103,000 locally built cars -- more than three times what it expects to produce under the cuts announced yesterday. Profit reached $186m on record revenue of $4.1 billion. Unhappily, the Territory decision was the exception rather than the rule.
Previously Ford had signed off on the design disaster that was AU and made a nightmare move into retailing that put its dealership network offside. And before long, it was stuffing up again. Short of development resources and subject to constraints from Detroit, it burnt its engineering dollars on programs that went nowhere.
With emissions regulations looming, it decided to kill its ageing locally built six-cylinder engine and replace it with a modern V6. Two years later, after a lot of wasted effort, the decision was reversed. At the same time, it decided to add the Focus small car to its Melbourne factory. But it changed its mind about that, too. Every reversal had a cost.
The Territory was allowed to get too long in the tooth before an overhaul while a diesel engine plan that would have kept it going when fuel costs soared was on, then off, then on again. Instead, it fitted a turbo petrol engine at just the wrong time.
As Broadmeadows fiddled, the Falcon burned. There was no money left to keep its variants going and as they got older, demand fell away. The luxury models were canned; so was the wagon. A new LPG engine took too long to develop, robbing Falcon of 30 per cent of its sales for 18 months. The V8 was deleted and not replaced. At every turn, the taxpayer has helped foot the bill.
The latest injection towards a $103 million facelift of the Falcon in two years keeps the car on life support until it and the Territory are due to depart in 2016. It stops Ford pulling out before that, as commonsense and good management would suggest it should. But 2016 now looks a very long way off. Even further than 2004.
