From the other thread:
Mind you there is the flip side of the argument that Australia simply could never and would never be able to afford to develop aircraft that were competitive with the large manufacturers of today and in fact the government had a lot of foresight to essentially get out of the aircraft design business when it did before it sucked an inordinate amount of money from the Australian economy.
One of the saddest things about Australian Government is the persistence of what I will call "Institutional Wisdom". These are mantras that are taken as gospel by the public service, usually with very little thought and still less research.
These mantras are harmful because they inform Government policy.
Most of these mantras boil down to "Australia can't afford to have (insert favourite industry) because we don't have the economies of scale / population to support it".
This is the argument that was to destroy Victa Aviation, the CAC Wamira, Ansett Airlines, the Nomad, and at least one car company.
The trouble with this argument is that it is based on the myth of "economies of scale". It ignores the simple fact that engineering technology, driven by the Japanese, has been doing it's level best to destroy "economies of scale" for the past Forty years, and has largely been successful.
The major weapon that destroyed economies of scale is computer aided manufacturing. This means computer aided design, and computer controlled manufacturing, especially computer controlled machine tools.
The reason these technologies destroyed economies of scale is that they reduced the huge investment required to build something new down to almost zero(well, a believable figure anyway).
In the "good old days" you required massive amounts of tooling to set up machines to cut and drill metal. These days you pretty much don't.
You required an army of design draftsmen to prepare and maintain blueprints of your parts and the associated tooling. Today it's pretty much all in your computer.
Same with manuals.
By way of example, GA produces most of it's sheetmetal with each and every hole CNC punched in it. No more of the old "Pilot hole and drill backwards" philosophy - and bugger all tooling.
When CAC was producing very expensive componentry for the F404 engines, they were doing it on exactly the same machines, in exactly the same working conditions, as GE were using in Lynn, Massachusets. No economies of scale involved at all.
Economies of scale are dead, build what you want, where you want.