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Originally Posted by RN7
Chrysler and the British car makers are long gone but GM Holden and Ford have been in Australia since well before WW2 and are still going strong, in fact they seem to be doing better than the Japanese as Nissan and Mitsubishi are now gone leaving only Toyota.
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"Going strong" is an illusion. They're heavily propped up by government (state and federal) financial assistance. It's a vote-buying exercise. Realistically, the Australian car making industry is no longer economically viable in a self-sufficient way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RN7
Australia's defence industry has certainly been on an upswing since 2000, their even building ships for the US Navy at the moment. Although a lot of the infrastructure is new, a lot of it was also around in the 1990s. Outside of the 2300AD timeline there is little of nothing about what happens in Australia during the Twilight War from canon, so we dont know if it was nuked or how heavily it was nuked. But 2300AD does state that the Australian military survived and took control of the country, and if that is the case then factories that produced its guns, munitions, uniforms and sundaries are likely to have been well defended.
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I suspect there were 4 major factors which led to the US-Australian alliance in 2300. 1) A logical extension of the alliance as it exists in RL now and in the time of the Twilight War; 2) Australia is likely to have become a vital stepping stone in the US Navy's links between the CONUS and the Middle East in the years at the end of and immediately after the Twilight War; 3) Australia has vast natural resources that are relatively easy to get to and far less tapped-out than America's so Australia is likely to have been a major trading partner of the US post-Twilight War (and something of a breadbasket too); and 4) I strongly suspect that Australia was one of those nations lucky enough to have found significant tantalum reserves in its territory, but needed the technological expertise of the US to fully realise tantalum's potential to make those nations with access to it into space-going powers.