Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is utterly dishonest for the Labor Party to continue to propagate the myth, the untruth, the falsehood that somehow a three-month-old government has had more impact on Holden, on GMH in Detroit, than the six years of their government and the international factors of costs of production, costs of labour, the cost of the dollar and the relative cheapness of being able to build motor vehicles in other markets. But this government is not going to buy up to Labor's petty and juvenile politics on the car industry. There are families' livelihoods at risk here. Let us remember it is not as the opposition leader tried to claim today that apparently over the next 10 days before Christmas hundreds of thousands of workers would lose their jobs. Often with new opposition leaders they over-egg the omelette. In this case the member for Maribyrnong has very much done that.

Over the next four years we need to make sure that all the workers at Holden, whether they are in Victoria or in South Australia, find work in South Australia and in Victoria. The beauty of the public's decision three months ago is that they elected a government that has a plan to do just that. Over six years Labor could not save Holden, no matter how much money they gave the company. They did not save Ford; it did not matter how much money they gave the company. They did not save Mitsubishi, and their policies demonstrably damaged the South Australian economy. The only example I need to cite is the fact that BHP Billiton decided not to proceed with their expansion of Olympic Dam.

One of the reasons they did so was that bad government policy constantly changed. That created sovereign risk in Australia and that caused them to look elsewhere because of the uncertainty and instability created by very bad government policies. We will address that issue. We will create an environment in Australia for more jobs to be created, just as we did under the Howard-Costello government for 11½ years. We will create that environment, by reducing taxes such as the carbon tax; the fringe benefits tax changes the Labor Party proposed; and the minerals resource rent tax. We will create jobs by taking away red tape and regulation, which we are already doing in the tertiary education sector and right across the business sector, and as the Minister for the Environment is doing with one-stop-shops for development and environmental approvals across Australia. We will do so by building the infrastructure in Australia that makes transport cheaper in this country, by building ports, railways and roads that actually ensure that we get our goods to market faster and cheaper and at a cost to the consumer and the exporter that makes their markets grow. Infrastructure will be very important to productivity. We have made it very clear that we want to be a government that builds infrastructure and improves productivity.

But, most of all, we will take away the incredible and extraordinary uncertainty that Labor created around government policy. So many foreign businesses had to rethink their investment in Australia and Australian businesses had to rethink their investment in their own country.

I well remember the former Treasurer talking about trillions of dollars, billions of dollars of pipeline investment coming down in Australia. As the months progressed, the number would drop and drop and drop, as one after another entity announced they were not going ahead with their investments. Olympic Dam was just one of those. We expect that, through certainty of government, stability of government decision making and true cabinet processes that give business certainty, we will create the environment that will ensure that foreign investment is encouraged and welcomed in this country and that domestic corporations make their investments here in Australia rather than companies like BHP Billiton weighing up Canada, Chile and Australia and deciding that Australia was too big a sovereign risk.

Mr Danby interjecting—

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