Another day, another stuffup from what already looks like the most incompetent government in Australian history. The Abbott government’s treatment of the car industry has been a disaster in policy terms, and just as bad as far as process is concerned. The key policy failure was the decision to retain fringe benefits tax breaks for cars (90 per cent of which are imported) at a cost of $1.8 billion over the forward estimates, while withdrawing Labor’s promise to give a much smaller amount in additional assistance to the remaining domestic manufacturers GMH and Toyota. Assuming Toyota also pulls out, every bit of the FBT concession will be public money sent overseas, with the exception of the slice creamed off by the salary packaging industry.

The policy process was even worse, announcing an inquiry, then pre-empting the result with a combination of leaks (of course, ABC stenographer Chris Uhlmann was happy to provide anonymity for the source) and Parliamentary taunts. Unsurprisingly, the new GM management in the US was sufficiently unimpressed to pull the plug immediately.

For the diehard fans of microeconomic reform, I guess this counts as a win. But even for them, it’s primarily a matter of cultural symbolism. The protection given to the car industry was so small that on a standard economic analysis, the welfare costs are utterly negligible. And of course, the benefits of protection were swamped by the costs of a chronically overvalued $A, which in turn reflects all manner of policy failures, from global financial deregulation to the subsidisation of the coal industry.