Opinion: Can we bring back our manufacturing industry?

Good marketing is the art of spotting an unfilled hole in the market and then producing the product to fill that hole. Pffft. Brilliant marketing involves stabbing the market in the chest to create a hole that wasn’t already there. And then filling that sucking, gurgling wound with whatever you had lying around.

Sounds cynical, I know, but this time around my great marketing scheme could just be the saviour for this fine country as a manufacturing force. See, ever since the car-makers turned off the lights for the last time, there’s been much hand-wringing about Australia becoming a post-industrial wasteland. But my latest grand idea would fix that, and it would do so by tapping into a couple of our greatest natural resources and manufacturing skill-sets.

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I’ll start by pointing out that nobody makes a bull-bar like we do. Of course they should rightly be called roo-bars since far more marsupials than cattle have gone to their reward straddling a dual-cab ute at 100 kliks. And why are we so good at roo-bars? Because we have a metric shitload of roos; all half-witted and waiting for a chance to jump in front of anything that moves.

Of course, other countries don’t need roo-bars because they don’t have roos. And right there, my friends, is our opportunity to stick that knife in and create the all-important gaping puncture-wound of opportunity. We’ll start small. With New Zealand. We’ll take a 40-foot container of male roos and a similar number of fillies. We ship them to NZ and let the blokes loose on the north island and the ladies down south.

Hey, there’s plenty of precedents for this. Look how foxes, rabbits and cane toads have improved life Down Under. Besides, the Kiwis love marsupials. They named their most famous rally driver after an overgrown rat that eats electrical wiring and fills the roof cavity with crap until the ceiling caves in. Usually at 3am. Then, when the critter expires (often at the pointy end of a spear-gun), our Kiwi mates skin it and, in a scene from Millinery of the Macabre, turn it into an item of headwear. That’s love and respect right there. So they’ll dig our gift-roos.

Anyway, the released roos that are strong enough to swim across Cook Strait and make sweet, sweet love will surely spawn a race of super-kangas, capable of bounding over Kiwi fences and onto roads where they will – at first – be a novelty. That will change as our friends to the east discover that having 200 kilos of gristle and sex organs cannoning in through the windscreen at 100km/h is somewhat sub-choice. At which point somebody will figure that the country needs a steady supply of good quality roo-bars. And who they gonna call?

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Yep, before you know it, every grey-import Nissan Elgrand or Toyota Previa full of smiling rugby fans will be considered incomplete without a silver-fern sticker on the back window and an Aussie-made roo-bar bolted to the front. And every ex-dairy in the country will soon be a roo-bar retail and fitting outlet.

There, I’ve just thrown the Aussie manufacturing industry a dead-set lifeline. And if it doesn’t work, imagine the hats those crafty Kiwis will be able to fashion while they wait for a tow truck. You’re welcome.