Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Labor Party just does not get it. And as if there was not any warning from General Motors executives, from Toyota executives: the OECD, in a report compiled in 2012, said emphatically that all the reasons General Motors identified today were the reasons that in 2012 the government at the time should have worked with the motor vehicle industry on the transition arrangements. This is not a surprise to Labor. They were warned by the OECD in 2012. The chief of staff of the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, was at the OECD as a Treasury representative at the time. And the warning was clear: if you do not deal with these transitional issues there will not be a future for motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia.

Of course we are upset about this; of course we are. We hate the fact that Australians are losing jobs. And we want to do absolutely everything we can to stop that. We were the ones who said that you cannot put a new $1.8 billion tax on the motor vehicle industry. We were the ones who said that the best way to help manufacturing in Australia is to get rid of the carbon tax. We were the ones who said that if you want to stimulate other industries, like the mining industry, the worst thing you can do is impose a mining tax. And we were the ones who said that you have to get rid of the regulation, you have to get rid of the red tape, you have to lower your costs of production in order to compete with the rest of the world. But the Labor Party do not get it. They have never run a business. Most of them have never worked in a business. It is all pure politics from Labor. And the losers out of that are the workers, because the Labor Party are more concerned about a political headline than they are about the worth of everyday workers.

We are going to do everything we can for the workers, not just at General Motors-Holden but also at Toyota—all the component manufacturers' workers—and also for the taxpayers of Australia. Ultimately what it comes down to is that prosperity comes only from hard work and enterprise; it does not come from the benevolence of taxpayers.

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