When Holden shut its gates at Elizabeth in 2017, Australia lost more than a car factory. It lost a symbol of national self-belief that we could design, build and export complex, high-value goods from Australia.

Eight years later, the same site is being reborn as a $500 million Australia Post “superhub,” processing 400,000 parcels a day by 2028. It’s the largest facility of its kind in the country and a powerful sign of the times.

Where once stood the proud workers of an industrial age — the proletariat — there now rises a new class: the boxetariat.

From production to distribution

Holden’s Elizabeth plant was the cathedral of post-war nation-building. It embodied an economy that made things: engines, transmissions, body panels, social mobility. Australia Post’s new facility will be the cathedral of logistics based on an economy that moves things, measures things and tracks things.

Instead of mechanical trades, the work will centre on conveyors, scanners and electric delivery vehicles. Instead of fabrication, there will be fulfilment. The shift from proletariat to boxetariat captures the larger story of Australia’s economic transformation: from an industrial base to a service and circulation economy, where value is created by speed, not by substance.

The change has been steady but profound. In 1970, manufacturing employed a quarter of Australia’s workforce. Today, it employs less than 7%. In its place have come the warehouses, depots and last-mile delivery systems of a society that consumes what others produce.

The new working class

The boxetariat is the new backbone of that system. They are the warehouse pickers, parcel sorters, van drivers and delivery riders who keep the arteries of consumption open. Their labour is essential but often precarious, algorithmically managed, subcontracted, and just-in-time.

They are workers of movement, not of making: paid to connect producers elsewhere with consumers here. Where the old industrial proletariat organised for rights and security, the boxetariat struggles for visibility, for fair pay and for time to breathe within the constant acceleration of digital capitalism.

Australia Post’s investment in Elizabeth will provide stable employment for many, but it also highlights the limits of the model. A logistics hub cannot replace a manufacturing ecosystem. It redistributes value; it does not originate it.

An Australian story

What is unfolding at Elizabeth is not unique to South Australia. From Broadmeadows to Geelong to Newcastle, the same pattern plays out: former industrial sites reborn as logistics and storage zones, data centres and distribution hubs. The warehouse replaces the workshop; the parcel replaces the product.

This is the Australian variant of deindustrialisation. For four decades, governments of both major parties outsourced industrial policy to market forces and comparative advantage. We dug and shipped minerals while importing finished goods. We became rich in property, poor in productivity and comfortable with dependency.

Now, in a world of fragile supply chains and renewed great-power competition, that model is being tested. Every parcel sorted in Elizabeth is a reminder of our position in the global hierarchy: consumers at the periphery, producers elsewhere at the core.

The green opportunity

Yet there is an opportunity hidden in this transformation. If the new hub becomes part of a genuinely green logistics network powered by renewables, supported by Australian-made electric vehicles and linked to local component manufacturing, it could mark the beginning of a new kind of industrial policy.

Australia Post’s rollout of 500 electric delivery vehicles nationwide offers a glimpse of this potential. The question is whether South Australia can build more than it receives: whether it can turn a distribution hub into a site of innovation, skills development and circular-economy repair.

Imagine parts of the old Holden site retooled for training in battery systems, electric drivetrains, and smart-freight management. The physical space and the symbolic history are there; what’s needed is strategic imagination, public and private investment.

From growth to renewal

What we are witnessing is the next phase of capitalism’s long arc: from the industrial factory to the fulfilment centre, from the assembly line to the algorithm. The underlying question is not only economic but civilisational: how does a society that once measured progress by what it built now define progress by how fast it delivers?

E-commerce is not a neutral technology. It reorganises urban space, labour relations and environmental footprints. The convenience of next-day delivery hides the carbon cost of constant movement and the social cost of precarious logistics work.

If we are serious about a “Future Made in Australia,” we must also be serious about what kind of future we are making and for whom.

Re-imagining the working class

The proletariat built things we could touch: cars, bridges, appliances. The boxetariat moves things we rarely see until they arrive at our doorstep. But both are part of the same human story of labour’s constant reinvention under changing regimes of capital.

To honour that history, Australia must give today’s logistics workers what the industrial workers of the past once fought for: security, dignity and a stake in the national project. That will require renewed unions, fairer contracts and a commitment to public ownership of essential logistics infrastructure.

From Holden to the horizon

Elizabeth’s transformation is both a triumph and a warning. It shows that South Australia can attract major investment, but it also exposes the narrowness of an economy built on movement rather than making.

If we continue to equate growth with throughput, we will remain a nation of consumers rather than creators. But if we use this moment to link logistics to learning, distribution to design and speed to sustainability, we can turn the story of the boxetariat into one of renewal rather than resignation.

Australia’s next industrial revolution will not look like the last. But it can still be driven by the same principle that powered the Holden workers of old: that real progress means more than profit; it means building something enduring together.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.