Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Fantastic! There goes the 'Minister for GrainCorp, chirping in again. He says, 'That'll do.' If you are an assembly-line worker who has spent 20 years at Elizabeth do you reckon you are ready to be retrained? They are skilled people—

Mr Joyce interjecting—

The redder and the louder you get, the argument does not get better, Sunshine.

This is not helping the workers. The government have told us this is an inevitability. They have said, 'Everyone knew this was going to happen. This has been a sure thing.' As we know, the Prime Minister says, 'Things happen in life.' If this has been such a foregone conclusion for so long, why don't they have a plan B, today? Where are all their bright ideas? I know they can scrap the carbon tax and the mining tax; how about helping workers get retrained?

This is why we censure the Prime Minister. Before the election, never in my wildest imagination would I have suspected that there would be such a cowardly performance by the government in surrendering manufacturing. There is an attitude from those opposite who say that modern First World countries do not make things anymore. Well, they are wrong.

I am happy to attend, with the Prime Minister, a meeting with the workers at Elizabeth. Let's go and talk with them. Let's go and talk to Holden workers together—you and me and the workers. We can talk. You can tell them all of your facts. You can tell them all your fine words. You can quote Christopher Pyne saying that today is not a day of doom and gloom. What I will say to the workers, the small businesses, the apprentices and the families of all these people who are displaced, is that if Labor had been in government we would not have let this happen.

We do not give up on manufacturing. We do not think that 'manufacturing' is a dirty word. Why on earth would this government say, of all things, 'it's too hard'? The real concern I have is not just the Holden workforce and the component workforce but what will happen with Toyota next. Look at this group opposite! All of you are the people who have decided we will no longer make cars in Australia. You have managed in three months to get rid of what it took Australia 65 years to build up. You are the wreckers of the car industry, you are the destroyers of jobs. Never could I have imagined before the last election, when recommending to people that they voted for us, that the problem was that if you got Tony Abbott you would lose a car industry. Even I would have thought that was an exaggeration.

But what we discovered yesterday and today is an administration sufficiently cynical that they fundamentally believe that they can sell a message to the Australian people that the world is too hard to compete in, that we cannot manufacture in Australia any more, that, if you pay people First World wages, somehow we cannot manufacture. This mob opposite have surrendered on Holden and the car industry—and let us not even list all the other jobs that have gone. You have been a busy government in three months. Electrolux, Simplot, CSIRO, Caterpillar, Peabody—you have a rollcall of jobs. But you will never ever shrug the shame: Holden has gone on your watch, and the car industry is in deep distress on your watch. This Prime Minister should be censured for giving up on Australian manufacturing jobs.

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