Time for a rethink of car manufacturing in Australia

Andrew Hastie is right, we should build things again.

Amid the post-Cold War euphoria from the 1990s onward, globalisation’s architects like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and even John Howard, preached the ‘commercial peace’ thesis. Open borders, supply chains snaking across continents, and WTO rules would bind nations in mutual prosperity, rendering war obsolete. Australia, ever the eager disciple, signed free trade pacts from Singapore to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), slashing tariffs and welcoming Chinese investment in our ports and mines.

It worked, economically. GDP boomed, jobs flowed, and our ‘mixed economy’, or the pragmatic blend of coordinated and competitive capitalism that Stilwell had so deftly mapped out, thrived.

But geopolitics has a rude habit of upending theory.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Time for a rethink of car manufacturing in Australia.

MICHAEL DE PERCY | "Andrew Hastie’s recent call to resurrect Australia’s car-making industry is far from radical."

Hastie, one of the few Liberals demonstrating any sense of policy and whose China warnings deserve applause, argues for reviving Holden and Ford assembly lines to… pic.twitter.com/THyT040O0j

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) October 11, 2025