Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Well, you will be even more interested if you are from South Australia. My apologies, you are from Port Adelaide. Both in South Australia and in Victoria we have a substantial industry called the car industry, highly reliant on plastics. Having been the minister for industry for six years, can I say that car manufacturers go to their component suppliers and say, ‘We want a cost down this year.’ And, of course, the component suppliers, who have this pressure every year, say, ‘Look, we just cannot do it anymore.’ What happens then is that those car companies, without any compunction, go to China and buy that plastic component—that door handle, that armrest, that piece of trim in the car.

So if we see a 7.4 per cent to 12.9 per cent cut in the average ability of these companies to pay wages, in terms of what they will have to reduce labour cost by, then you are going to see more of these component companies go under. This is at a time when we hear the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in the other house speak about how important the car industry is and how much pressure it is under. I agree with every word he says because, as I say, six years of assisting that industry has taught me just how lineball it is. But at a time when that industry and, more importantly, the component industry that supports it are reliant on support from government, it is going to introduce legislation that affects their core component suppliers. The ACCI release goes on to say that its study shows the cuts in labour costs for chemicals manufacturing SMEs will need to be between 1.8 per cent and 3.2 per cent; and for machinery and equipment manufacturing, between 1.8 per cent and three per cent.

While the legislation we are discussing now is very sound legislation, legislation that needs to be amended and needs support in both houses and will get support in both houses from the opposition, it is legislation which provides the ability for the CPRS to decimate Australian industry and jobs. And when that debate starts in earnest in the Senate, the Senate will not bow down to the bludgeoning that we got on this side of the House, when the time that we could speak on that bill was cut in half.

This bill is not perfect. It does not provide certainty and flexibility for the mining industry, especially with regard to contract miners. There need to be better provisions to allow flexibility on who actually has to report the emissions—that is, the mine owner or the contractor operating the mine. The former parliamentary secretary, now Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, who was negotiating with the coal industry should know how that industry works. He has got plenty of it in his own electorate. The industry has asked the government to amend this legislation so that the default position in the case of emissions reporting lies with the owner of the mine. Here he comes—welcome, Minister—just in time to hear this. He is trying hard—

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