Oz Made
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday June 25, 1990
FINDING money tighter and tighter, these days? Are you budgeting carefully, with a fearful eye on the economic downturn, and shopping around conscientiously for the best price? Do you worry about the balance of payments crisis and look for "Australian made" labels?
The description fits most people these days. Unfortunately, it appears that every last one of us is part of the problem, not the solution.
An Agenda analysis of price and product data has demonstrated dramatically that consumers buying on price probably can't help but add to Australia's balance of payments woes. And buying Australian is, in a frightening number of cases, simply impossible.
The analysis, carried out with the permission of the Australian Consumers'Association, focused on two sets of buying data: products surveyed for the association's magazine, Choice, between January 1989 and June 1990 (see footnote to table); and products surveyed for the Herald's own consumer column published fortnightly in Tuesday's Good Living section.
This gave us 64 product categories in all, and a broad spectrum of the purchases Australians make, including everyday budget items like canned tomatoes, ballpoint pens, drinking chocolate and light bulbs, personal accessories like umbrellas and suitcases, a big range of minor and major household goods and appliances and a few high-tech items like cameras and video cassette recorders.
These were analysed by price and country of origin. In the table we show the proportion of Australian-made brands to the total brands found in each product category; and state whether or not the cheapest product in each product category was Australian-made.
It makes a scary picture.
In a huge 77 per cent of product categories, the Australian product, even supposing there was one, was not the cheapest.
In more than one-third of product categories, there was no Australian-made representation at all |
Worse - in almost half of all the product categories, the Australian-made products were less than one in five of the total, a figure that suggests that many Australian manufacturers may be losing the competition with imports and may be a dying species.
It should be said at the outset that though Choice usually goes looking, before it begins a test, for every brand available, it does not necessarily test them all, usually having to set some financial limits. So it may, for instance, concentrate on brands available in at least three States or on models not previously tested.
The Herald's Tried & Tested columns are even more circumscribed, being limited to small product surveys in the Sydney region. So a zero for Australian-made brands does not prove that there are no Australian goods whatsoever in these product categories. But it does suggest they have limited distribution and are very hard to find, whereas their imported equivalents are everywhere.
Australian manufacturers don't seem to be able to tackle the high-tech products successfully. The table has no Australian brands of VCR, camera or compact disc player, even though a huge range of foreign brands is available.
On the other hand, low-tech seems to escape us, too. There are zero Australian scores for products as diverse, simple in construction and commonplace as alarm clocks, garlic presses, pepper grinders and umbrellas. Perhaps we can't compete on price with Third World imports of these. But why can't we compete with the high-priced, high-quality First World versions, either? Most imported items in this category include representatives from both ends of the spectrum.
We put the results of this analysis to Mr Bill Henderson, federal chief executive director of the Australian Chamber of Manufactures, hoping for reassurance, and didn't get it. He believes Australian manufacturing industry must go to the top of the national agenda urgently.
High interest rates and high inflation have kept the Australian dollar too high, he said, encouraging imports and hindering exports. And without exports, the Australian market is too small to make manufacture of many products viable.
"Seventy per cent of the balance of payments deficit is due to imported manufactured goods, chiefly consumer goods.
"Imports from countries like, say, Singapore, can be very cheap comparatively, despite shipping costs, because the manufacturing investor is, typically, Japanese, German or Taiwanese, attracted by generous government assistance and enjoying the advantages of high productivity, modern equipment, low wages, very large throughput due to the huge regional market and superb shipping. Southbound shipping rates are very much better than northbound.
"And there is no getting away from the fact that Australians see Australian products as not measuring up. Too much Australian industrial design is stodgy. We have to ensure that manufacturers get really good design expertise into the exercise right from the outset. It is a bleak picture."
Representatives of the chamber met the Prime Minister on June 15, asking for a national conference on manufacturing as a matter of urgency and for personnel in the Prime Minister's Department to co-ordinate a focus on solving the industry's problems across the various ministries concerned.
Is there any area where we do we shine? Examine the table for categories in which Australian brands constitute at least half the total and you'll come up with just 12 out of the 64 categories; and a lot of them represent the great Australian dream: portable gas barbecues, food and drink coolers, insect repellents and lawnmowers, for instance.
Maybe the nation should come inside for a while.
Product No. Australian-made/
Total no.
Air conditioners,
reverse cycle (CH) 4/10 *
Alarm clocks (T&T) 0/11 *
Answering
machines (CH) 0/8 *
Baby slings & packs (CH) 5/18
Ballpoint/roller pens (CH) 8/43 *
Barbecues, portable
gas (T&T) 9/13
Batteries, AA (CH) 8/36 *
Cameras, compact
35mm (CH) 0/55 *
Cassette decks,
twin (CH) 0/13 *
Ceiling fans (CH) 2/9 *
CD players (CH) 0/18 *
Cooktops, electric (CH) 4/10
Coolers, food/drink (T&T) 5/5
Cots (CH) 10/16
Crackers, Xmas (T&T) 2/7 ns
Desk lamps (CH) 2/12 *
Dishwashers (CH) 1/6
Dishwashers (T&T) 8/21 *
Drills, electric
impact (CH) 2/14 *
Drinking chocolate (T&T) 5/6
Dryers, budget (CH) 6/6
Food processors (CH) 0/11 *
Fridges, frost free (CH) 3/5 *
Garlic presses (T&T) 0/7 *
Ghetto blasters (CH) 0/15 *
Hammers (T&T) 2/10 *
Heaters, fan (CH) 7/14 *
Highchairs (CH) 7/18
Insect repellents (T&T) 6/7
Irons, steam (CH) 7/20 *
Knife sharpeners (T&T) 0/7 *
Knives, chefs (T&T) 0/9 *
Light bulbs (CH) 6/17 *
Microwave ovens, 0/24
Mowers (CH) 6/8
Outboard motors (CH) 1/7 *
Ovens, mini (CH) 2/7 ns
Overlockers 0/8 *
Pasta sauce (CH) 13/20 *
Pepper Mills (T&T) 0/7 *
Rangehoods (CH) 4/13 *
Remote controls,
universal (CH) 0/5 *
Secateurs (T&T) 0/8 *
Shavers, electric,
ladies' (CH) 0/10 *
men's (CH) 0/19 *
Shower roses (CH) 5/16 *
Steam irons (CH) 4/11 *
Suitcases (CH) 1/19 *
Tomatoes, canned (T&T) 1/10 *
Toys (T&T) 8/42 *
TVs, 48cm (CH) 3/9 *
large stereo (CH) 2/5
small (CH) 0/11 *
Umbrellas (T&T) 0/7 *
Vacuum cleaners (CH) 12/29 *
wet & dry (T&T) 4/6
Vacuum flasks (T&T) 1/9 *
Video tapes (CH) 2/9 *
VCRs (CH) 0/14 *
Wall ovens (CH) 6/7
Washing machines (CH) 14/36
Water purifiers (CH) 9/24 *
* cheapest product made overseas ns Country of origin of cheapest product not
stated
CH Choice magazine - Products are those surveyed for issues published between
January 1989 and June 1990, whose price and country of origin was tabulated or
prominently shown. Where the same category of goods was tested more than once
during the period,the later report was used.
T&T Tried & Tested, the fortnightly consumer column in the Good Living Section
of the Herald. Products are those for which country of origin data was included.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
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