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."

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.