Tuesday, Sep 13, 2016 at 21:51
I see your point Phil, but it is getting awfully hard to keep track of who builds what where. What may have originally been made in Oz when first brought onto the market morphs into a chinese sourced product on a regular basis. of course you have to do a bit of homework to find out these things as the sales people will not tell you and they certainly don't say in advertising brochures.
I used to be in wholesale rural supplies. Years ago there were a number of companies that manufactured using BHP or similar materials to produce anything from C clips, barb wire, all your fencing from chook/birds through to the h/duty stuff for farms. Your star pickets and gal posts and rails, at one point even cattle crushes. All this was made in Oz from Oz steel out of
Newcastle.
This sadly has all changed due to the end users choice. Not the business owner. The end user is happy enough to take chinese produced goods because it is cheaper end of story. I will give you one example, had a pallet of rural netting out of
waratah, top quality 100 mtr rolls that wholesale were $275. Whenever I had the opportunity I would push these to the produce stores, co-ops or hardware outlets that were chasing that spec. These were country people from
Charleville to
Cairns . The answer was always no one is going to pay that when the chinese roll is $189. We are talking paying $2.75 v $1.89 a mtr .
If that is not enough we were making chainwire using One Steel wire from
Newcastle to begin with originally, in 2 years the raw material cost increased 25%. To be competitive swapped to Malaysian sourced wire landed cheaper than we were paying at the beginning. A.R.C who are probably the first ones in this market all those years ago have bailed, They are no longer manufacturing chain wire.
The chain wire market is no small potatoes niche market, there are government contracts that can come to hundreds of thousands, but it is very hard to get them when you are behind the 8 ball being hog tied by raw material costs and everyone one else isn't.
One particular company though has been able to survive, they run it as a church based organisation therefor .pay little or no tax. Whether or not they use Oz wire I have no idea.
All in all our free trade agreements are working, those that dig out the raw materials get a motza, they ship it overseas to get processed by someone who is just happy to have a job, the government gets royalties to top up their super and the plebs like me who scape up enough money have a choice in buying something possibly Australian made for $1000 or obviously Chinese for half the price. Which in a lot of cases has the same level of aftersales service. S.F.A
I am sorry to say my buy Australian made mantra died when I owned a BF falcon. The only people I was supporting were the dealer staff, 1 out of any 2 parts replaced were sourced by them from aftermarket outlets. Made in China.
P.O.S AND NEVER AGAIN.
Sorry about the long winded post but I feel that the battle is lost. We were stuffed the day woollies and Coles and all their various entities came to the market place.
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