I notice you completely ignore the negative environmental consequences of this global trade, which by definition are producing enormous damage to both the atmosphere and oceans with no accountability as to that cost. Plus, the wages and working conditions of seafarers, due to the use of corrupt and criminal “flag of convenience” cabotage shipping, are atrocious, another cost pushed on the poor and vulnerable, and coerced slave labour is also used by the monumentally corrupt international shipping trade.
When these goods are purchased from places with relatively low environmental standards to “save costs”, it doesn’t save anything, just shifts the costs on to someone else. We ended up, as did New Zealand, with diesel locomotives from China that contained asbestos, a prohibited import, something that has also been discovered in cars built in China. And the Indian built trains that QR bought had to be modified to be disability compliant, the Korean trains bought for NSW are still sitting in their shed, costing a fortune and doing nothing because of the maggot-brained ideological hubris of the corrupt government that bought them.
And, as I’ve said before, I’m not here to defend the ALP, or the Whitlam government. While the Whitlam government was a massive improvement over the racist and pederastic criminal warmonger regime that preceded it, abolishing conscription and the white Australia policy and getting out of the criminal and racist Vietnam war, there are many things about it which reflect the essential gutlessness of the ALP when it comes to many issues that concern me. And the less said about the post Wran ALP NSW governments the better.
Rolling stock built here will provide good jobs and ensure environmental standards, which can always be improved, are maintained. The lower costs purported to be the benefits of foreign manufacture are just costs shifted onto someone and somewhere else, lower wages for workers and lower environmental standards are more exploitation of the weak by the voraciously greedy and corrupt plutocrat class. As for that matter, the share of the economy going to capital compared to wage earners has never been higher, wages are going backwards while profits, and the pay of CEOs and other corporate parasites is going through the roof. Reintroducing high wage manufacturing jobs would help redress that imbalance, and to pay for it the solution is simple - punitive and confiscatory taxes on the unearned income (capital gains) on the parasitic and bludging top 10% of income earners, much larger resource rental taxes, criminalising the use of foreign tax evasion in the Cayman and Channel Islands etc, windfall profit taxes on excessive corporate profits across the board, abolition of family trusts, and the confiscation of profits earned through deliberate environmental degradation as proceeds of crime.
It all depends on your priorities.
Tony
> On 17 Aug 2022, at 23:01, TP historyworks@...> wrote:
>
> Well it was the Whitlam government that signed the Lima Declaration that started the ball rolling on sending manufacturing overseas and importing the products. I agree that we should be encouraging local manufacturing, but the costs aren't always competitive and when it's a government procurement, the extra cost is borne by the taxpayer and comes with an opportunity cost of additional stock or other improvements to the public transport system foregone.
>
> According to Alstom, the basic cost of the G class trams is $10 million per car. The $18 million figure would, I think, relate to including those extras like the depot etc. Similar doublings of cost compared with ordering from overseas often occur with passenger trains built in Australia, like the 390 train cars to be built for Queensland Rail at Maryborough under the Queensland Train Manufacturing Program. (During the last decade, Queensland has also acquired 450 NGR suburban cars built in India, which would have enabled QR to build up the numbers quickly.) Perth and Adelaide have sourced electric trains from Maryborough or Melbourne, though Perth's C series order or 246 cars is being built in Perth. When local manufacture becomes a requirement in tenders, few will tender without a guarantee of continuing repeat orders, otherwise all of the plant and equipment has to be amortised over one job and the price of the product goes through the roof. Then you end up with a situation like with Alstom at Dandenong, where there is a monopoly local manufacturer, undermining the whole basis of competitive tendering, and that manufacturer can charge what they like. All of this gets charged to the public transport budget.
>
> I think you can see the effects of a local manufacturing requirement in the fleet-renewal/expansion outcomes in recent years. (Some of the overseas orders include finishing and outfitting in Australia, some don't.) Over the last decade (ignoring orders still in process), as far as I can determine, 425 suburban rail carriages and 100 tramcars have been built for Melbourne, of which 308 carriages were built in China. I want to include Vlocitys too because I believe they're regarded as interurban commuter trains, but I can't find a breakdown for the last decade. At a calculated guess, there are about 200 of these cars built over this time.. So that's about 600 or so commuter rail carriages and 100 trams over the past decade.
>
> In NSW, without the constraint of a local manufacture requirement, over the last decade there have been acquired by the present government 934 suburban, metro and interurban rail carriages (from China, India and Korea), 91 tramcars (from Spain) and 19 large to medium ferries (from Australia, China and Indonesia). Some of these orders are still in progress with more to follow. During this decade, another 636 suburban cars were acquired from China, but I've separated them because they were an order set in motion by the previous Labor government. If we include them as actual products of the last ten years, that's 1,570 commuter rail carriages, 91 tramcars and 19 ferries. (Compare with the actual outcome record of the previous 15 years of Labor government of 220 train carriages, 5 medium ferries, no tramcars and no metro cars!)
>
> So NSW's record of local manufacture of these major vehicles/vessels has been pretty appalling over the last decade, but look at how much has been acquired and how far the money went compared to Victoria - more than twice as many rail carriages, almost the same number of trams, plus ferries on top. And I'm sure Victoria's figure would have been much lower had they not acquired the HCMTs from China but built them here. It's also not only the cost, but the local manufacturing capacity too. Since we lost Comeng, the capacity no longer exists for this scale of procurement within quite short timeframes.
>
> I've left buses out because, even though chassis and drive components are invariably imported, at least we can body buses locally. I also haven't mentioned the small fleets of trams in Gold Coast, Canberra and Adelaide, all of which have been imported from Germany or Spain. Trams are simply not viable to manufacture in Australia at a sensible cost, because of the low volume and lack of continuity. So we get a situation where production has to be drawn out in order to keep the plant running and the workforce and suppliers usefully employed. A tram can normally be built in a fortnight or less. How long does it take to build a tram at Dandenong for that fabulous price? It's a dilemma for sure. Import them, get heaps for the money and get them quickly, or manufacture them locally, get far less for the money and wait far longer for them. What's the answer?
>
> Tony P
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 12:14:50 UTC+10a...@... wrote:
> The other negative aspect of importing everything manufactured while exporting raw materials with no added value is the adverse environmental effects of dragging stuff around on these enormous ships that burn the worst, high sulphur, high CO2 emitting fuel that is available, kill more whales and other sea mammals than Japanese “scientific research” ever has, and dump containers full of whatever toxic filth they are carrying into the ocean during storms.
>
> But these are all considered inconvenient “externalities” by the perpetrators of this ecocide so the real cost of this global trade is concealed in the name of greed and, as always, the polluters get off free.
>
> Tony
>
>
>> On 17 Aug 2022, at 11:23, Matthew Geier mat...@... <applewebdata://32637D06-1FB6-415D-8C1B-25FBCD4C6509>> wrote:
>>
>
>> Are we able to compare like for like though?
>>
>> The G class contract price almost certainly includes the new depot and 20 years of maintenance. There will be a premium for local manufacturers and yes it's not fair that the PT budget cops that cost, but the headline cost probably includes much more than the cost of the actual vehicle making direct comparisons difficult. And keeping those workers employed building them is probably cheaper than throwing them all on social security (although that comes out of a different pot of money). Although ultimately as a taxpayer, I pay either way.
>>
>> Mal has pointed out in the past that the G class contract includes handing over proprietary code and tools to the onboard computer systems to PTV. How much did Bombardlier jack up the price for that 'option'?
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 17 Aug 2022 at 10:34, TP histor...@... <applewebdata://32637D06-1FB6-415D-8C1B-25FBCD4C6509>> wrote:
>> This month's TAUT has an item that throws some rare insight into the basic cost of a tram. Pilsen is ordering a new fleet of Skoda 40Ts, which is a 30 metre design almost identical to the Melbourne E class. The price has apparently risen 23% because of the current economic situation in Europe - to $AUD 4 million per car. The discrepancy between this and the $10 million label on a 24 metre G class car sort of puts it into perspective. I agree about encouraging local manufacturing, but I have a problem with the extra cost coming out of the public transport budget because it means you get less than half as many trams for the money at a time when you desperately need to replace old trams and/or increase the fleet - or less of some other urgent public transport need.
>>
>> https://zdopravy.cz/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Tram_Plzen_3.jpg https://zdopravy.cz/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Tram_Plzen_3.jpg
>>
>> Tony P
>>
>> On Wednesday, 10 August 2022 at 20:50:21 UTC+10 Mick Duncan wrote:
>> Good one,Greg
>>
>> Cheers, Mick
>>
>>
>> On 8/08/2022 4:37 pm, Gregory Robinson wrote:
>>> Yarra Trams got rid of route 69 so I guess F class would be out of the question.
>>> Adelaide had their F type.
>>>
>>> ------ Original Message ------
>>> On Monday, 8 Aug, 2022 At 10:25 AM, TPhistor...@...> <> wrote:
>>>
>>> When this thread started we didn't know what class the new trams were going to be, so we speculated that it would be F. Subsequently it was announced that they would be G class.
>>>
>>> Tony P
>>> (tripped up by the thread title himself)
>>>
>>> On Monday, 8 August 2022 at 09:30:14 UTC+10 trams4me wrote:
>>> Was the F class designation for the new trams ever an official "thing" or merely a gunzel affectation?
>>>
>>> All the official documentation refers to "G" class, thus named as "G" is the seventh letter of the alphabet, the tram is seventh generation and thus their numbers will be 7001 - 71xx.
>>>
>>> Yuri.
>>> --
>>> Gallery at https://tinyurl.com/trams4me https://tinyurl.com/trams4me
>>> ----------------------------------------
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TramsDownUnder" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email tounsub...@...">tramsdownunder+unsub...@googlegroups.com <>.
>>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/567374f0-7e35-457f-a3f0-44c1a496b7d0n%40googlegroups.com https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/567374f0-7e35-457f-a3f0-44c1a496b7d0n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer.
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TramsDownUnder" group.
>>
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email totramsdownunde...@... <>.
>>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/2f657584.3f4d4.1827c2ca379.Webtop.93%40telstra.com https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/2f657584.3f4d4.1827c2ca379.Webtop.93%40telstra.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer.
>>
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TramsDownUnder" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email totramsdownunde...@... <applewebdata://32637D06-1FB6-415D-8C1B-25FBCD4C6509>.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/09ef1153-0cb4-4bf5-9fc6-683028051999n%40googlegroups.com https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/09ef1153-0cb4-4bf5-9fc6-683028051999n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer.
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TramsDownUnder" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email totramsdownunde...@... <applewebdata://32637D06-1FB6-415D-8C1B-25FBCD4C6509>.
>
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/CAG-%3DV-Ko-_q6i0an0gutLj26%3DkOuA8rVi-E3s7sX4AF%2BvW6dnw%40mail.gmail.com https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/CAG-%3DV-Ko-_q6i0an0gutLj26%3DkOuA8rVi-E3s7sX4AF%2BvW6dnw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer.
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TramsDownUnder" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email totramsdownunder+unsubscribe@... mailto:tramsdownunder+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/ba4b67e4-46ba-4efe-ae14-0fddbcef281an%40googlegroups.com https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tramsdownunder/ba4b67e4-46ba-4efe-ae14-0fddbcef281an%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer.