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A Holden badge on a vintage car
And then there were none: the last Holden to be fully manufactured in Australia rolls off the production line on 20 October. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
And then there were none: the last Holden to be fully manufactured in Australia rolls off the production line on 20 October. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

'It's a bit of pride': the last Holden marks an end to car manufacturing in Australia

This article is more than 6 years old

Thousands to gather outside Adelaide’s Holden plant to say farewell to the car that became ‘part of the family’

At 5.45am on Thursday, three generations of the Grant family piled in to a Holden Commodore and pulled out of their driveway in the western Melbourne suburb of Sunbury and turned toward Adelaide.

It was the second time in six days they had made the 700km trip. The first, on Saturday, was a two-car convoy: Daniel Grant and his 16-year-old son, Jacob, in the 2006 red VZ SS Commodore and Grant’s father, Ross, in his new white SS Commodore.

That trip was a celebration, a gathering of 25,000 people in 1,200 vehicles – all Holdens – making a slow lap around Adelaide’s northern suburbs, past the Holden manufacturing plant at Elizabeth, where a photographer waited to capture each car as it sat beneath the lion-and-stone emblem.

“This next trip’s more like going to a funeral,” Grant told Guardian Australia. “When they said years ago that they were going to [close the plant] I said I’ve got to be there on the day they build their last car. To pay my respects, I suppose.”

The last Holden to be fully manufactured in Australia, a red VFII SSV Redline Commodore sedan, will roll off the production line at Elizabeth on Friday morning.

It has been wending its way through the factory all week under the supervision of the remaining 950 production workers, who are also completing farewell models of the Caprice V, a luxury sedan used as a police car in the United States, as well as a V6 Commodore Calais wagon and an SS Commodore ute.

But it’s the SSV that tugs at the heartstrings of Holden fans, who are legion. More than 2,000 of them, including the Grants, plan to park outside the factory before workers arrive at 6am to greet the last shift.

Many have travelled from interstate.

This is not an ordinary factory closure. It is the end of an era for both Holden and for car manufacturing in Australia.

Holden: a look back at seven decades of making Australia's own car – video

Toyota rolled its last car off the line in Geelong on 3 October and Ford closed its manufacturing plants at Geelong and Broadmeadows in October last year. Mitsubishi, often the forgotten cousin of Australian mass car manufacturing, closed its plant in Adelaide’s southern suburbs in 2008.

Thousands of Holden cars were on show in Elizabeth on 15 October ahead of the Adelaide plant’s closure. Photograph: David Mariuz/EPA

For the first time since 1948, when the first mass-produced Holdens, the 48-215, were produced at Fisherman’s Bend in Melbourne, Australia will no longer build its own cars.

The engineering and development divisions will remain.

Paul Bastian, national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, pinpoints the closure of the Holden and Toyota manufacturing facilities to 2.08pm on 10 December, 2013, when then treasurer Joe Hockey stepped up to the despatch box in Parliament House and demanded Holden “come clean with the Australian people about their intentions”.

“We want them to be honest about it — we want them to be fair dinkum—because, if I was running a business and I was committed to that business in Australia, I would not be saying that I have not made any decision about Australia,” Hockey said. “Either you are here or you are not.”

The federal government had been in lengthy discussions with Holden’s parent company, General Motors, for several months about the company’s request for $150m a year in government assistance to offset the cost of production in Australia, which had ballooned as the mining boom drove the Australian dollar to record highs.

Without that assistance, GM said, it was not sure it could keep manufacturing in Australia.

Holden received $1.8bn in government support between 2001 and 2012, Hockey said. The automotive manufacturing industry as a whole received $30bn in financial assistance between 1997 and 2012, according to a 2014 Productivity Commission report.

Hockey’s comments, which were followed by similar remarks from then Nationals leader Warren Truss, splashed across newspaper front pages the next day under headlines saying the treasurer had dared Holden to leave.

Federal opposition leader Bill Shorten at old parliament house in Canberra on Thursday with an FX Holden to mark the closure of the Holden plant. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

GM made the decision to pull production before the first editions were printed that night, and Holden managing director Mike Devereux made the formal announcement to staff at the Elizabeth factory the following day.

Toyota followed suit on 10 February, 2014. Ford had announced its intention to move offshore in May 2013, two months before the federal election.

“It was clearly a decision of this government to dare the auto sector to leave,” Bastian told Guardian Australia. “It was a disgraceful performance by a government, I’ve never seen anything like it before and I hope I never see anything like it again.”

More than 800 people have been retrenched from Holden’s Elizabeth plant in the four years since the closure was announced and the remaining 950 will formally finish up on Friday.

The plant has been in operation since 1965.

The Holden Kingswood was one of the company’s most famous models. Photograph: David Mariuz/AAP

According to Holden’s own figures, 83% of those who have left the company have “successfully transitioned” into other opportunities, while 9% are still looking for a job and 6% opted not to take part in the $30m transition program.

That’s slightly misleading, Labor’s industry spokesman Kim Carr says, because the program’s measure of success includes retirement or returning to study. It does not mean the majority of ex-Holden employees have found full time employment that matched their annual average salary of $60,000.

“A lot of the jobs that people are going to are casualised, itinerant, and pay substantially less,” Carr says.

A 2006 study of the impact of the closure of the Mitsubishi manufacturing plant found that of those retrenched in the first wave of redundancies, 25% remained unemployed, 11% were self employed, 31% were in full time work, and 7% had retired. Of those who were employed, only 4% had permanent positions while 35% were casual and 15% were on short-term contracts.

The AMWU, which learned from the lessons of the Mitsubishi closure, says the transition programs at Ford, Toyota and Holden were much improved. But the economy is not as robust as it was in 2008, and Carr says that, combined with policy settings that he says do not support the growth of the vehicle component manufacturing industry, could make it more difficult for those who walk out of the factory on Friday to find work.

“[The Mitsubishi closure] was in the middle of a mining boom,” Carr said. “We are not in a mining boom now.”

The total national job losses as a result of the closure of end-to-end car manufacturing were estimated to be 200,000, according to a 2014 study by the University of Adelaide’s Australian workplace innovation and social research centre.

About 6,500 of those were people directly employed at car manufacturing plants.

As of August this year, there were 44,212 people working in the vehicle manufacturing sector in Australia, of which 92% worked full time and 85% were men.

jobs graph

Most of those jobs are in the vehicle component sector. Carr said Australia needed to invest in those workplaces, which consist of 70 to 80 tier-one suppliers and about 1,000 other smaller companies, to prevent them from also going offshore.

Bastian is not optimistic that component manufacturers will remain in Australia. He said some replacement manufacturing jobs will be created by in the $90bn naval shipbuilding program, which will be centred around South Australia, as well as other defence spending in armoured vehicles and F-35 joint strike fighter production.

He says that allowing Holden and other manufacturers to leave was short-sighted.

“The reality is we’re an island nation,” he said. “To think that we can survive off breaking big rocks into small rocks, and agriculture, is a nonsense.

For Holden fans, the loss is less economic than psychological. It does not matter to them that Holden will continue to sell a version of the Commodore, which was Australia’s best-selling car from 1996 to 2000 and is a fixture on every suburban Australian street. The car will no longer be built in Australia. The 2018 Commodore model is a German-built Opel Insignia, rebadged as a Holden and sized up to a V6 for the Australian market.

“Makes you wonder why they insist on calling it a Commodore,” said one commenter on the motoring.com.au story announcing the new model. “Anyone with any loyalty to that name would know that it isn’t one.”

It’s that loyalty that makes the loss of Holden hit harder than earlier closures like that of Mitsubishi, which had the same devastating impact on an isolated Adelaide job market.

The final Holden cars will roll off the factory line on 20 October. Photograph: HOLDEN/EPA

There is a deep affection in Australia for generations of Holden vehicles. It is difficult to imagine the same level of affection for a Mitsubishi Magna, the Japanese company’s Commodore equivalent.

“The Magna wasn’t really a huge car that people loved,” south Adelaide man Raymond Ross said.

Ross has two Holdens: a 1977 HQ SS, the first SS model manufactured in Australia, and a 2017 SS Commodore.

“When I realised the factory was shutting up and there weren’t going to be anymore and I was in line to get a new car, I thought: How cool to have one of the last SSs released … I sort of see it as a set of bookends; the first and the last.”

Quick Guide

Holden's history

Show

1856 – Holden begins as a South Australian saddlery business

1917 – Holden manufactures vehicle bodies

1931 – General Motors buys Holden Motor Body Builders

1948 – The FX, the first Australian-designed car, is released

1951 – Holden's first ute goes on sale

1958 – South Australian manufacturing plant opens at Elizabeth, though it does not assemble its first full car until 1965.

1968 – Kingswood and Monaro enter the market

1969 – Holden makes its first V8 engine

1971 – Holden launches the HQ model

1978 – Commodore replaces Kingswood

1990 – Holden's last Australian boss, John Bagshaw, quits

2003 – Holden opens $400m V6 engine plant at Port Melbourne, exports to Korea, China and Mexico begin. Toyota takes Holden's position as top-selling car brand

2009 – Parent company, General Motors, files for bankruptcy in the US but survives

2013 – Prime minister Tony Abbott says the government will reduce support for automotive manufacturers despite appeals for help

2013 – Holden decides to end manufacturing in Australia by 2017. The Holden Commodore is to become a fully imported car

2017 – The company rolls its last car off the assembly line on 20 October, ending more than 50 years of car production on the Elizabeth site

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The Grants planned their arrival in Adelaide on Thursday afternoon to leave enough time to wash the VZ so it is presentable at the factory the next morning.

Grant says the car, along with a 1973 LJ Torana which had previously been owned by his father, were “part of the family.” The Torana carried himself, his younger brother, and later his four children on their first trip home from hospital. It was the bridal car in his wedding.

“Holdens in my family go way beyond just a form of transport, they are part of the family, memories are made with them,” he said.

“It’s a bit of pride; pride that we don’t have to rely on the world to make good stuff. It’s good quality. We made good cars here.”

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