Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The people of Hotham returned a Labor Party member to this House in the September election because they wanted to be represented by a person and by a party that would stand up for their interests and protect their jobs. It is in this spirit that I rise today to make a contribution to this very important debate. I will talk about my local area, but before I do that I want to talk about the impact of this appalling public policy decision on the economy more broadly. Other speakers have talked about the importance of the automotive industry for the Australian economy. I want to add my voice to this.

The industry employs 45,000 people directly. The member for Barker could look up the difference between direct and indirect employment a little later, perhaps on Wikipedia, because 200,000 jobs depend indirectly on the automotive industry. It produces $5.4 billion in net output and the auto industry is the largest research and development contributor of any industry in Australia. Seven hundred million dollars was invested by that industry last year. But all of this is at risk and we will be particularly affected in my home state of Victoria.

Those are some of the direct impacts on and direct threats to the economy, but I also make the point that what we are seeing here is the Abbott government threatening to renege on a deal that was made by the last government to co-invest in the auto industry. I am a person in this chamber who does have direct experience in business and I know that the most important thing that businesses want from government is certainty. What we have here is a government that is supposedly pro-business but feels very comfortable about making a deal with the auto industry and then reneging on it later. This has much more severe impacts. It is basically saying to the private sector that they cannot rely on anything that this government says.

The impact on Hotham will be very significant. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that almost everyone in my electorate will be affected, either by direct job loss or through someone they know losing their job. I want to talk about Mackay Consolidated, a manufacturer of rubber parts I visited in September, in Chesterfield Road in Moorabbin. There are 120 people employed there and they signed a contract with Holden in April 2012 to supply engine and ancillary hoses for the current Commodore model. I met many of the workers in that factory and can I just say that these are people who are not easily going to transition into another line of work. That is just not the reality of the people who work in this important industry.

I want to talk about Venture DMG. They are a plastics component manufacturer who manufacture for Holden. They provide bumper bars and door panels. Three hundred people are employed in their Keysborough site, just outside my electorate, and a further 250 are employed in Campbellfield and work mainly for Ford. ZF Boge create engine mounts and transmission mounts for Holden and 40 workers are employed in their Dingley factory in my electorate. These are jobs at risk. Knock-on effects are going to be felt all over Hotham that will probably impact some of the 5,000 small businesses in my electorate and the hundreds of local families who rely on jobs directly or indirectly due to the car industry.

It is not just about the workers who work in these industries. There is no secret that manufacturers in Australia are doing it tough. It is something that is very top of mind for us in Victoria. In fact, I note that the Liberal Minister for Manufacturing in Victoria, David Hodgett, has talked about the devastating effects that this could have on our economy in Victoria. Over there we hear time and time again that this is really just about the car industry—'This is about their poor management and their poor decisions.' It is not something that most of Australia's economists agree with. Most of Australia's economists can tell that the biggest challenge that faces our manufacturers today is the high dollar. Our dollar is probably double in value what it has been over various points in the last decade.

We face a choice in this chamber—the government over there face a choice. How are they going to manage this period of time when we have such a high dollar in Australia? Are they going to let the rest of our economy decay? Are they going to let workers join the dole queue while we have this very high dollar situation? We will still need to have an economy when the mining boom ends and the dollar comes down again, and this is going to require industry support. It is another example, I think, of what we have over there: a government of economic ideologues. It is time they pulled their noses out of the economics textbooks, went out into their communities, talked to people who work in these factories and tried to understand what the devastating impact of these decisions could be. That is certainly how we feel about it in my electorate of Hotham.

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