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

Obviously, the people playing politics with this issue are the shadow minister and the Labor Party, who are delving back into the mid-1990s to attack the current government in 2014. But to answer his questions: he also raised, of course, the issue of the car industry and the manufacturing sector. Well, I did not hear him saying that somehow the Labor government was to blame for the closure of Mitsubishi or the closure of Ford and that the policies that Labor tried to support at that time, of massive government subsidies to the car industry, did not save Ford and they did not save Mitsubishi.

As I come from a great state with a large car industry, as does the shadow minister, I think we are both well aware that the announcement by Holden from Detroit was that no amount of money at all would have kept them in Australia, that it was simply uneconomical and uncompetitive for them to be able to build motor vehicles here. Trying to frighten the workers of Holden or Toyota through rhetoric today when, in fact, his own government did not save that Mitsubishi Ford has rather a hollow ring to it.

To answer his questions specifically: I am advised that reducing the redundancy cap to 16 weeks will affect 858 claimants each year. And because I am a generous man, and in spite of it not being estimates, I am also prepared to tell him that pausing the indexation of the maximum weekly wage will affect around 588 claimants each year. I assume that he has now run out of material, but if he has not I am prepared to keep answering questions.

Oh, he has run out of questions!

See this speech in context