MOTORING INDUSTRY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4231, 15 January 1940, Page 6

MOTORING INDUSTRY

DEVELOPMENT IN AUSTRALIA. fWlhile no one knows precisely how many Australian industries have benefited and are continuing to do so from the ever-increasing use Of the automobile, it is certain that no industry has spread its benefits so far and so wide as does the business of assembling, merchandising, and servicing new automobiles in the Commonwealth, and the maintenance of the 830,000 cars and commercial motor vehicles operating on Australian roads. Directly and indirectly it is computed that 200,000 Australians depend on the industry and automotive transport for their livelihood, but the number of our citizens gainfully employed because of the automobile amounts to a much higher figure and a fairly high percentage of the nation’s population. There are tens of thousands of. men engaged on road work throughout the Commonwealth, most of their wages coming from £17,000,000 paid by motorists this year in petrol tax and registration fees. There are the coal, steel, timber, electrical, leather, rubber glass textile, chemical and paint, and petrol and oil industries, all of which are stimulated by automotive transport and its further development.

The Commonwealth Postal Department could not function as efficiently as it does to-day were it not for the many millions of miles travelled annually by the army of mail contractors, whose duty it is to carry His Majesty’s mails throughout the length, breadth, and hinterland of the continent. Along some 114,000 miles of highways and out-back tracks, business correspondence, letters of friendship, and other mail matter are transported by some thousands of automobiles. Swiftly, surely, and economically does this work go on in an amazing national service. This is only one of the outstanding benefits conferred on Australia citizens by the now-übiquitous motor vehicle: The Australian railroad system benefits greatly from motor transport of goods to and from stations and railroad yards, and the extent to which this work is carried out with dispatch is not generally credited or conceded to the motor, but the railroads would soon be in a sorry plight if petrol supplies were not available to keep the motor vehicles of industry working efficiently and regularly. The same applies to industry after industry; in short, the business and home life of the nation would suffer an upheaval were the countless services rendered by automobiles seriously interrupted,, says the Dunlop Perdriau Bulletin.