Back in the 70s and 80s there were many tariffs that were directly related to the manufacturing in Australia.
However, our tariffs were more about protecting jobs than protecting and developing industries. Australia has always been a "taker" when it comes to investment and we are shite at developing our own industries that aren't purely primary (ie extractive like mining or agricultural).
We have some companies today that are global but have nothing to do with tariffs. Atlassian in software, some mining related engineering and services companies.
There are others like CSL which was spun out of government, Brambles/CHEP that again, was spun out of government (CHEP stood for Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool in WW2).
But our governments are terrible at promoting secondary industry or supporting them. Our R&D grants are complicated and are focused on compliance, not on results.
Australia is the "lucky country" but the full quote is:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
It sounds like Australia is a victim of the resource curse. Resources bring in the money regardless of how competitive you are. There are no incentives to compete and improve because Australia can afford complacency and incompetence.
Australia has a smaller population, very high wages and a technology-phobic government with policies that have filtered all investment into the property market for decades - rather than letting investment go into high-risk-high-reward projects. Not much to report on the megacorp front.
There are major Australian companies out there; the Atlassians, BHPs and CSL's of the world. They aren't Samsung by any stretch.
Australia has second rate government and second rate management. We're good at digging up dirt and shipping it, or ploughing dirt and shipping it in the form of food.
Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.
No insight into Australian management, but having lots of valuable dirt to dig up does make it much harder to get going in other lines of business.
I think this is called "dutch disease" by economists: the high wages paid by the dirt-digging (early on) mean that you can't simultaneously be competitive in metal-bashing, which makes it hard to develop other industries.
