The Federal Government’s grand $6.2 billion industry plan for the automotive sector, A New Car Plan For A Greener Future, is full of important implications for policy and political economy (and quite a few ironies).

But I was more struck by this remarkable example of historical blindness in the Prime Minister’s introduction:

Our first car took to the road as early as 1897, when David Shearer demonstrated his steam-driven horseless carriage in South Australia. Yet it would be two generations before the first 48-215 Holden came off the line in 1948, and motor vehicle production began in earnest.

That’s a measure of how hard it is to establish an automotive industry, and a reminder of why Australian governments have dedicated themselves to ensuring that we remain a car-making country.

This is weird argument because at no time in automotive history was car-making more accessible to entrepreneurs than it was in those first few decades. In the period before the Great Depression, the industry was nothing like it is today. It was characterized instead by many small scale manufacturers, dozens upon dozens of models in countries that are no longer considered car builders. This collection of car catalogues from 1909 gives just a taste of the diversity of firms involved in the industry at that time in the United States alone - Atlas, America, Babcock, Baker, Benz, Buick, C.G.V., Cameron, Corbin, Courier etc etc etc.

It was only in the time of economic downturn that the industry was consolidated and the industry adopted the structure which we are familiar with in the mid-twentieth century. But in the first half of the twentieth century, entry into the automobile industry was easy, not hard. Australia’s lack of a automobile industry in those early decades was more likely because Australia just wasn’t suited - for whatever reason, economic, social, geographic - to be a major car manufacturer.

Of course, this is picking on an extremely minor point. But, in 2008, if it is going to take $6.2 billion before the Australian car industry can be ’self-sufficient’, then we still might not be destined to have a major automotive sector.