Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As you head out of Melbourne and go on the bypass around Geelong, you go over the Lewis Bandt bridge. The Lewis Bandt bridge is there because Lewis Bandt invented the ute when he was working for Ford back in 1932. A farmer came to him and said, 'I want something that will get my pigs to market on Saturdays and my wife to church on Sundays,' and Lewis Bandt, working for Ford, invented the ute. That to me stands as a symbol for the innovation that this country is capable of, especially in manufacturing. But we need to remember that innovation and manufacturing need support.

Manufacturing in this country has been under enormous pressure, especially from the mining boom. The mining boom has driven up the Australian dollar and the mining boom has been great for those states that are resource rich. But in the south-eastern states, where much of the manufacturing is concentrated and where you do not have the same benefits of the mining boom, you get the pressures of the mining boom. You get a high Australian dollar, which affects your costs, especially if you are wanting to export. You have to compete with rising costs of labour and other inputs with the mining and resources sector that can afford to pay more, and you find yourself—as we have in Victoria—under Liberal governments at the state and federal level with the gross state product per capita going backwards. We have had negative economic growth in Victoria when the Liberals have been in charge at both levels. We are seeing that happening at the same time as some significant decisions are being made that will affect Victoria and the south-eastern states in particular, with the car makers moving out and will all be gone by 2017. That is a fact: they are going. And they will be gone in 2017.

We have to decide between now and then, and with an eye to what happens after that, is the transition for states like Victoria and South Australia that get the pressures but not the benefits of the mining boom, and where there are many people employed in manufacturing and associated industries. What we have though is a government that believes vision is a dirty word and that refuses to have a plan to ensure that the Australian manufacturing sector will survive the pressures of the mining boom and the pressures of global competition.

It is not as if this government is not prepared to support some industries. There is $13 to $18 billion in subsidies going to the mining sector that are quite prepared to bankroll the Liberal Party to ensure that they got into power so that they could then repeal the mining tax for them. They are quite happy to say to the likes of Gina Rinehart, 'We will give you a subsidy on your petrol and your diesel so that you do not have to pay the same tax that everyone else has to pay.' They are quite happy to write out the cheques for several billion dollars every year on accelerated depreciation concessions and other forms of generous treatment to those in the industry that they like. They are quite happy to say to the four large banks, 'Look we have heard the IMF say that the Australian public is actually subsidising you to the tune of about $3 billion a year by standing behind you with a taxpayer guarantee that allows you to go and borrow more cheaply in a way that your smaller competitors cannot. We are quite happy to give you that form of public subsidy.'

We are quite happy to have an industry policy that says big mining and big banks are worth billions and billions of dollars every year. But what we are not prepared to do is come up with a transition for the manufacturing sector that will help Australia move to a clean energy future where there are jobs if we have the vision to ensure them. Instead, they are coming along and saying, 'We want to cut off the lifeline that we have given you that will be there for a couple years in order to transform your sector. We want to cut that off early. We are not content with you leaving in 2017 and with people trying to find work and trying to find additional contracts for their businesses over the next couple of years. We want you to leave in an unplanned fashion at severe economic cost'.

I think transformation in our motor vehicle and transport sector is a great idea. We have been calling for some time for governments, Labor and Liberal, to come up with a plan to transition our car-making sector to the vehicles of the future, where there are lower emissions and where we grasp the opportunities that electric vehicles provide. This is not something that is fanciful. A year or so ago, the front page of the Herald Sun drive section previewed the electric Commodore. The electric Commodore was put together by a small consortium of Victorian manufacturers with Holden support, working on a shoestring, to take a best-selling car in Australia and make it electric. And they had worked out how to do it. They were asking for support to get that up and running so that that could be something that might sustain car making in Australia in the future. Similarly, when we look around the world, we see that the German and the United States governments have set targets in their countries for electric vehicles, about how many electric vehicles they want to have on the road within the next decade or so. That is the kind of thing we could be doing in this country and that would drive that innovation.

We, as the Greens, want to see much greater investment in public transport. But public transport needs rolling stock. It needs components. It needs equipment and resources that can be found in this country.

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