Australian Camper Trailer Guild boosts membership

Just about everywhere you looked around the camper trailer display area at this year’s NSW Caravan, Camping, RV & Holiday Supershow, were signs displaying the distinctive green and yellow triangle logo, denoting membership of the Australian Manufactured Camper Trailer Guild (AMCTG).

Formed in September 2011, the fledgling organisation has more than doubled its membership in just eight months, from 14 camper trailer manufacturers to 29 currently.

The Guild also lists as members on its website 10 “Australian-made suppliers”, including canvas manufacturers Bradmill Outdoor Fabrics, Defab, and Wax Converters Textiles.

With its primary role to promote the advantages of buying a camper built mostly from Australia-made components, the Guild says it ensures “all members are subjected to engineering compliance for Australian Standards and also confirm that their complete manufacturing process is conducted in Australia with the very best of materials”.

Russell Wood, the general manager of Cub Campers, which has been a driving force behind the AMCTG, said public response to the Guild has been “incredible, because a lot of people are looking for a genuine, Australia-made product”.

He said a strong reason for establishing the Guild was dissatisfaction with the Australian Made program, which Cub Campers participated in for a number of years.

“We used to be part of the Australian Made program, and the reason I pulled us out of that is because they don’t scrutinise it,” explains Wood. 

“There was a manufacturer who was claiming to be Australian Made, and we knew quite clearly they weren’t. We knew it was Chinese canvas and the construction was flat-packed.

“We rang (Australian Made) and said we’ve been a member for three years and you haven’t come around and checked us out. And they said we can only really check out about one per cent of our members. So I said, how do you know if some-one’s cheating, and they said we rely on other members to tell us.

“It’s a joke. People think the Australia Made logo is something of integrity, and we did too... That was around the time we decided to start the Guild.”

While admitting no local RV manufacturer can ever boast “100 per cent Australian made”, he says many Guild members including Cub Campers come close. The Sydney-based manufacturer builds many components in-house including furniture and slide-out kitchens and uses locally-sourced raw materials where possible including Bluescope steel and Wax Converters canvas.

“I would contend that it would be very difficult for anybody to be more Australian-made than Cub,” he says.

Also at stake, according to Wood, is the long-term existence of the local RV manufacturing industry and the jobs and skills it creates. He says Cub Campers has put on five apprentices this year, after the opening of its new $7 million manufacturing facility in Sydney last year.

“If you don’t fight for it, it’s gone,” he says. “I don’t know whether we’ll go down with a sinking ship, but we’ll certainly try and keep the ship afloat. Because we like doing it, we’re manufacturers, that’s what we like doing, we’re not assemblers.

“We like actually building things and designing them and taking them out on the road and testing them.”

Another role of the Guild is to lobby the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Fair Trading and the Federal Department of Transport and Road Safety (DOTARS) to enforce Australian law and prevent locally-assembled trailers with high imported content being passed off as Australian made.

“What we would like to happen is for the ACCC to start monitoring some of this stuff, so if someone says it’s Australian made they have justify it. Because if they made a sale on that basis, if they told someone a lie, it’s fraud. All we want to say is tell the truth.”

“It’s only when someone gets killed that the authorities will do something about it. Then they will go and ask the company for engineering compliance whereas the Guild members have to have it.

“(Cub Campers) has had it for years; it’s just common sense, you just got to have it, have an engineer sign off on all your designs...”

“The authorities for some reason allow this industry to self-regulate to a degree which isn’t healthy, in my opinion. Everyone needs scrutiny, because there’s a lot of cheats out there.”