Industrial South

Why Australia Deliberately Destroyed Its Manufacturing Industry Between nineteen forty and nineteen forty-five, a country of seven million armed the Pacific war. Essington Lewis wasn't just a steel executive, he was the wartime Director-General who built it in five years. "I am work." But on the eighteenth of July nineteen seventy-three, Gough Whitlam cut every tariff twenty-five percent with five hours' notice. Treasury was not consulted. John Button legislated the rest by two thousand. On the twentieth of October twenty seventeen, the last Commodore rolled off the Elizabeth line. Today, the Holden Elizabeth and CAC Lidcombe lines are gone. This is the story of how Australia armed itself, and what forty-four years say about a country that destroys what it built. This is not just the story of Essington Lewis. It's the story of every nation that builds in wartime, then dismantles in peace. #EssingtonLewis #HoldenElizabeth #AbandonedFactories #LostFactories #IndustrialDecline …