Clive Palmer's car crash plan

FEDERAL clown candidate Clive Palmer plan to merge Australia’s three car makers into one presumably-subsidised plant demonstrates his lack of prime ministerial credentials. For a supposed buccaneering free marketeer this is a nonsense. Little wonder that he his candidacy is linked to his plan to build a replica of the Titanic. His car plan belongs at the bottom of the ocean, too. He told a Palmer United Party (PUP) gathering in Adelaide that political leaders should create the incentives for one plant to build cars economically. Clearly this PUP needs house training. Billions have already been spent propping up inefficient car manufacturers in marginal electorates and Palmer wants to spend more. “There's a lot of reasons we can't manufacture properly in Australia - and one of reasons is the size of the run in the plants. “You've got to start from somewhere and if you brought the manufacturers together we'd solve that problem.” The size of the run should be dictated by demand. If the demand isn’t there, the companies should be considering whether they are operating smartly. Palmer thinks Ford could use the single plant to produce its 40,000 vehicles a year and Toyota and Holden to produce their 90,000 each, and, to his thinking, this would create a production run that was big enough to compete with Asian motor manufacturing plants. But this is Disneyland thinking and those who subscribe to it are Snow White’s dwarfs. Australian car plants are inefficient for a number of reasons. Labor’s Green-backed desire to price Australian energy above the world price is one of them. The ridiculous union demands are another. The billionaire miner seems to lack even a basic understanding of economics. He should stick to digging coal out of the ground and shipping it abroad where it provides cheaper electricity to industries than it would if it were sold and used to power Australian businesses. If Palmer wants to be believable he has to stop being the clown in the contest. Money can buy a lot of things but he has demonstrated it doesn’t buy brains.