Nothing could highlight the moment more than the release by the AADA of a clever new tool to be used by dealers to educate their local members on how dealers contribute to the economies in each of their electorates.
When the focus was on local car manufacturing, the influence on government of a few car companies was high because of manufacturing jobs located in only a handful of federal electorates.
With local car building gone from next month, car dealers are now the main game in the automotive industry.
According to the Australian Automotive Dealers Association (AADA), this country’s franchised dealer network generates revenue in excess of $66 billion, employs more than 66,000 people, pays wages of over $4 billion annually and has invested around $17 billion in facilities.
There are car dealerships in every electorate and they typically employ a broad range of people, in both blue- and white-collar jobs, whose affiliations will fall on both sides of the political divide.
The AADA has recognised this power shift and has devised a mapping tool of each electorate to help their members make effective use of it when dealing with their local politicians.
The mapping tool, that will be launched at the AADA’s National Convention at Darling Harbour next week, allows car dealers to display the economic contributions made by their businesses to individual federal electorates and associated communities.
Called Electorate Fast Facts (EFF), the interactive tool can be used to retrieve a range of data on employment, total economic contribution, taxes, duties, wages and salaries and other payments made by new car dealers in each of the 150 federal electorates.
The data mapping means dealers can present the information to members of parliament in a readily digestible form to illustrate the important economic role new car franchisees fulfil in their electorates and communities.
AADA CEO, David Blackhall, said the objective is to increase awareness of contributions new car franchisees make to their communities by presenting politicians with facts that have never been mapped in this level of detail before.
“There is a notion abroad in some corridors in Canberra that the importance of the Australian automotive business disappeared to a dot point when the three local assemblers decided to call stumps.,” he said.
“The EFF tool puts the lie to that. It drills down from the 60 thousand national automotive retail jobs to, for example, the 388 jobs that our dealers create in the Prime Minister’s electorate of Wentworth.
“This tool will substantially contribute to the AADA’s ability to help dealers advocate on their own behalf at the grass roots level. It will also continue to build AADA’s reputation as the leading automotive advocacy and policy body in Australia.”
Ironically, the electorate to benefit most from car dealer activity is that of Canberra in the ACT which has 540 people earning a total $46.6 million directly employed by new car dealers, while sales there generate just over $7 million in duties and $3.5 million in registration fees.
EFF was developed by BDO’s Automotive Team in conjunction with the AADA Secretariat and IT supplier IndieTech.
Franchised new car dealers who are members of AADA will be provided with access to the EFF free of charge.
Daniel Cotterill is a former federal ministerial chief of staff
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