Bit off the "Best Truck Movies" topic, but Lang's last post bought to mind the problems or sometime "dodges" that used to occur when vehicles were "supposed" to comply with "Australian Content" rules.
From what I recall of it and what I had read about it, preference was given to British (or UK) makes , something to do with "Equal trade" between Commonwealth countries. (A side story to this may be why Canadian manufactured goods did better than American goods, even if both owned by a parent company e,g, Ford, G.M etc).
However, as usual, I digress. Reading a bit today about even though a hell of a lot of trucks and cars, were fully imported from the UK in the fifties and sixties until the sheer volume were surpassed by the Yank tanks. To circumvent some of the import duty on said UK gear, a lot of vehicles were imported CKD and then "outfitted" locally, bodies, trays, tyres, rubber etc etc. What was going on apparently, although maybe a blind eye was turned towards it, or maybe the Govt. thought that as long as some form of tax were being paid, if indirectly, was that a lot, in fact the major portion of these companies that were supplying the "extras" to get these vehicles on the road were owned by the parent company back home in England!
The glass manufacturers, the wheel/rim manufacturers, in fact a huge slice of the components required to get the vehicle operational, were very simply put, overseas owned. As I said, if these overseas owned, but locally skilled worker supplied factories were paying things like sales tax, taxes on workers wages, all the required taxes , the Govt., of whatever stripe, gave it the nod. Sounds a bit like the duty on tobacco tax and the Govt. spending millions telling you to give up smoking!
Of course, I may have this all arse backwards, just the way I interpret what I read.
Quite possibly the same thing was being done over in the Aussie "Yank Truck" camps, notably International Harvester and much later, Kenworth, just to name a couple. What the "Australian Content" percentage wise tallied I'm not sure, but would bet quids that the added componentry companies were either hand in glove with the builders, or certainly helped out by them.
Not saying there was anything wrong in the way it was structured, we simply didn't have either the resources nor the skilled workers at the time.
But, just reading on the now dead and buried Australia car industry, if Canada can maintain a viable industry with a lot less population to draw on (than it's border neighbour) , what happened here?
Probably something to do with Canadian trade agreements with America??
Anyway, done and dusted now, the topic has been well and truly covered here and elsewhere.
