Put your thinking caps on how you would deal with these scenarios

[rwbuild]

In your discussions, please do not play politics, the scenarios are beyond politics because when push comes to shove, its about servival
Think of coronavirus as a test run: Australian military leaders warn we must prepare for worse - ABC News

[doug3030]

Nothing unusual there. Defence is continuously preparing for all kinds of scenarios. That's their job.

[woodPixel]

Saw that article this morning.

I've been thinking a lot about it.

-- Talked to a couple of people in the USA and gauged their opinions on things. They expect things to get pretty rough - shortages are everywhere on everything, supermarkets have limited all purchases to 2 items of anything.

-- I personally think the fuel issue is big. Price is one thing - getting it here another.

It would be within our interests, as a country, to get the military (or some business) to buy 5 or 10 cheap supertankers and fill them with oil. Park them somewhere convenient.

-- I don't think we can trust the USA. When the shoving starts they won't be our friends. They will act exclusively in their own interests. They will engineer a war with China and we need to be prepared for this (even though we won't have any involvement)

-- Australia needs to be friendly and helpful to all. Once we've solved our problems, we need to help others.

-- We need to start engineering and manufacturing here. I know people say we can't, but we must. I was going to start a thread about it, but wanted to try and think things through a bit first.

[BobL]

Talked to a couple of people in the USA and gauged their opinions on things. They expect things to get pretty rough - shortages are everywhere on everything, supermarkets have limited all purchases to 2 items of anything.

Most supermarket shortages are not shortages of the the actual goods especially food - just internal logistics. Yesterday we could not buy a 1 or 2 kg bag of rice yesterday but there were heaps of 10 and 20 kg bags available. Primary producers are now dumping bulk food because restaurants are not taking bulk foods.

-- I personally think the fuel issue is big. Price is one thing - getting it here another.
It would be within our interests, as a country, to get the military (or some business) to buy 5 or 10 cheap supertankers and fill them with oil. Park them somewhere convenient.

I think we need to be a bit smarter that that, 10 torpedoes and we have nothing. See comment on electric vehicles below.

-- I don't think we can trust the USA. When the shoving starts they won't be our friends. They will act exclusively in their own interests. They will engineer a war with China and we need to be prepared for this (even though we won't have any involvement)
-- Australia needs to be friendly and helpful to all. Once we've solved our problems, we need to help others.

I agree - we need to be more independently minded.

We need to start engineering and manufacturing here. I know people say we can't, but we must. I was going to start a thread about it, but wanted to try and think things through a bit first.

Rather than just duplicating existing engineering and manufacturing we need a smarter more holistic approach.
For example;
We cannot make anything unless we have the necessary materials, so if we wanted to start concentrating on something specific we should at least be able to produce our own critical materials and not just digging stuff out of the ground. Let's start with the water purification chemicals and medications.
Energy production should be distributed rather than concentrated into big facilities- a couple of big incendiary bombs on a coal fired plant and it's toast.
Electric vehicles would reduce our reliance on fuel and leave more of it for critical needs.
Instead of setting up a factory to make only widget X it should be designed to be readily adaptable to make several widgets.
If shipping/transport was properly costed for its environmental foot print then OS stuff would be come a lot more expensive and it might be worth making here. Local production would dramatically reduce fuel usage eg WA should not be importing milk from the rest of Oz.

[rustynail]

Nothing unusual there. Defence is continuously preparing for all kinds of scenarios. That's their job.

Your faith is greater than mine.

[doug3030]

Your faith is greater than mine.

I just said that they do it. I didn't say they do it well.

[Lappa]

For example;
We cannot make anything unless we have the necessary materials, so if we wanted to start concentrating on something specific we should at least be able to produce our own critical materials and not just digging stuff out of the ground.

Don’t a lot of the necessary materials we need to make require “stuff out of the ground”?

[Chris Parks]

Laurence Hartnett wrote the book on how to kick start industry in Oz when WW2 was in progress, it appears that some people should find a copy and read it. He basically started a lot of industry in Oz when the supply chains were cut off and his work eventaully led to Holden Car manufacturing after the war finished. The politicians told us we did not need manufacturing in this country, I wonder what they think now. It is hard to leave politics out of it as all of them colluded to strip this country of major manufacturing capacity in the latter part of the last century.

[woodPixel]

Rather than just duplicating existing engineering and manufacturing we need a smarter more holistic approach.
For example;
We cannot make anything unless we have the necessary materials, so if we wanted to start concentrating on something specific we should at least be able to produce our own critical materials and not just digging stuff out of the ground. Let's start with the water purification chemicals and medications.
Energy production should be distributed rather than concentrated into big facilities- a couple of big incendiary bombs on a coal fired plant and it's toast.
Electric vehicles would reduce our reliance on fuel and leave more of it for critical needs.
Instead of setting up a factory to make only widget X it should be designed to be readily adaptable to make several widgets.
If shipping/transport was properly costed for its environmental foot print then OS stuff would be come a lot more expensive and it might be worth making here. Local production would dramatically reduce fuel usage eg WA should not be importing milk from the rest of Oz.

I was thinking about this, somewhat.

Obviously I'm not an engineer, nor even a businessman (well, a crappy one!)

I was thinking about a few companies that I know of that did start manufacturing in China. It was not a simple affair, plus their problems are continuous and sometimes severe.

All of them started with a blank field. None of them turned up one day into outer-Shenzhen and there, behold!, was a paper coffee cup factory or bicycle parts maker.

On all of them, the owners had to go over and set absolutely EVERYTHING up. Factory, machines, processes, know-how...everything. The ONLY benefit I could tell were the prices of labour.

While cheap as chips then, I've been separately told three times that the labour costs have tripled since 2011.

One was moving to Vietnam, but the problems are even worse there.

Interestingly, all of these businesses didn't just start some random Tuesday with a vision - they all started small here, grew, developed and THEN moved off shore.

So I know for a fact that the argument of "raw materials aren't available" isn't correct. Perhaps one could say something like expensive/hard-to-get/readily-available.. etc... but unavailable isn't one of them (why can't the raw materials be shipped from China?)



I keep thinking of Germanys Mittelstand economy.

I keep thinking today about how people have suddenly classified all sorts of things as essential. They couldn't have been too bloody essential if they were farmed out to a single place at the lowest bid. Seemed that profits were more important than its....essentialness.


I know people say we can't, but we must.

[elanjacobs]

-- We need to start engineering and manufacturing here. I know people say we can't, but we must. I was going to start a thread about it, but wanted to try and think things through a bit first.

We already do, I do it every day and there's a lot more of it happening than you might think, but it's relatively low-volume, high-value products.

High volume, low value is not going to happen unless wages and/or product costs are heavily subsidised.

[chambezio]

Just reading the above comments made me think of the farm machinery INVENTED and MADE by H.V McKay the Sunshine Harvester Man. He very proudly cast into his parts of the machinery his name and the place of manufacture in large font so you couldn't miss it. Most of us would have something made by the DAWN company who not only have the name proudly cast into their parts but also MADE IN AUSTRALIA.

Due to the virus we are urged to "look after each other" so how about going the extra mile and promote Australia? As tool users we all would have come across many many locally owned manufacturers especially tools with some age on them and most of us are still getting results with them because they were made to last!!!

I am proud to be called an Australian but I reckon that we need to be training the young ones to manufacture local brands instead of buying inferior/substandard imported stuff that we whinge about when they don't perform as intended.

I will now step down off my box and wander into the gloom

[BobL]

Don’t a lot of the necessary materials we need to make require “stuff out of the ground”?

Sure but mining is just stage 1 of about 10 manufacturing stages.
The big time area we lack is a presence in is then materials/chemicals we need for critical things like water purifications, medication.
Even something as simple as surgical masks require oil has to be turned into various plastics and fibres before it can be made into mask making materials.

One of the silliest thing we're doing is exporting ALL our lithium. It goes to China to be processed and purified and then turned into batteries. If some investment was put into this we could make enough batteries to power electric vehicles (less fuel needed) get rid of coal fired electrical generation plants so we could set up a fully distributed electrical system which would be much more secure AND we could export Li-ion batteries. I'm really surprised some of the hawks haven't got onto this.

[Beardy]

The reason all these Australian manufacturers moved offshore was because it was so difficult and expensive to do business here. Not intending on union bashing but they did make things extremely difficult for many/ most businesses. I know as a result we all enjoy better working conditions but it cones with a price. Companies that have stuck it out here in Australia has ultimately meant their demise.

Everyone gives lip service about buying Australian but ultimately price wins out and the imported product wins out.
You only have to look at other threads here how people buy directly from O/S and complain about local companies ripping them off

I don’t know what the answer is but you can’t have it both ways

[elanjacobs]

[rwbuild]

So far the majority of comments have revolved around what we used to do well before and the why we went OS.
BUT, thinking caps on, what DO WE DO NOW and HOW. Identify the needs, what are the components, how do we source/manufacture, what is the business model and how to make it sustainable.