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

The interjection is that public transport needs customers. Up until a little while ago, there was some federal government money going towards public transport projects. This government has come along and cut it out because, apparently, that is not what federal governments do

They are quite happy to put billions into a road that will then in turn support car retailers but they are not happy to put money into public transport that could create jobs locally.

So if we want to build that rolling stock and other components for public transport we could do that here as well—even renewables. The solar plants that you see that have a large number of solar panels that all face the sun at a particular point in time and which all tilt and turn as the sun moves around require gears and hydraulics. And there are companies in Australia that are now able to manufacture those. In fact, they are being scouted for by overseas solar plant developers in countries where they have a far more farsighted view about renewable energy than this government does. But even that requires manufacturing. There is a future for manufacturing in this country if we choose to grasp it, but we need a plan.

It is all well and good to talk about high-tech, high-value jobs in advanced manufacturing being what will sustain us in the 21st century, but advanced manufacturing needs a general manufacturing base. It is that interaction between the innovative designs, being able to test them in the place that makes them and then being able to continue that loop that is essential. If you gut the country's manufacturing base then you cut the capacity to innovate in the same way as you otherwise could.

One thing that this government does not seem to understand—none of the speakers that I have heard so far speaking to this bill have addressed this—is that, yes, everyone in this parliament, and I expect everyone in the country, accept that the car makers will be gone in 2017. Yes, there is an argument about why you would continue any particular scheme after that. But what is not spoken about is the position, not of the people who work for the car makers but of the people who work for the components companies.

No-one from the government side is talking about this. There are tens of thousands of people who work in those component-manufacturing companies in the components sector. What is crystal clear is that if this scheme is brought to an end early then that includes removing support for the components sector early, because that is part of this bill as well. And if the money is removed from the components sector then the car makers themselves may not be able to source the components locally and may in fact move out much earlier than 2017, or when they have otherwise planned.

In other words, cutting the subsidy early may have the effect of hastening significant unemployment for tens of thousands of people who work not just for the car makers but for the components manufacturers as well. That puts them in a very difficult position, because people are relying on this next couple of years to diversify their companies. People are relying on this next couple of years with planned government support to say, 'I can see the writing on the wall with car makers going and so maybe only to find a new market for the components that I make. Maybe I need to look overseas. Maybe I need to diversify into renewables. Maybe I need to go somewhere else entirely.' If this bill passes they will not have that option to transition; the rug will have been pulled out from underneath them.

But it is not just the businesses who are going to be significantly affected if this bill goes through. It will not be just the big businesses and the small businesses in the components sector but a group of people who the government very rarely thinks about, which is the workers in those sectors. One thing should be very obvious, and that is that if you are about to lose your job in a couple of years because the car maker is about to pull out, and you know it, you can plan for it. You can plan to retrain and you can plan to go and look for another job. Anyone will tell you it is much easier to find a new job if you are in an existing job. If you are in an existing job you have the security to then be able to go and look for new work elsewhere. That is what the car makers are doing at the moment with their employees—helping them find work elsewhere.

But if you pull the rug out from under these people now then you are going to put tens of thousands of people into the labour market at the same time and force them all to look for a job while living on $250 a week. And if they are under 30 they will probably spend the first six months not getting any money at all, if this government gets its way. But the government will be forcing people who have been working in this sector for some time all to go into the job market at the same time and all to try to find jobs while all of them have $250 a week. That is this government's brilliant plan for dealing with growing unemployment. And I can tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it is going to hit the south-eastern states hardest and that is where we are already suffering, as I have said before.

There is a different way. If the government had the guts and a vision to realise where the rest of the world is going—to realise that there is a clean energy future and to understand that there is a place for manufacturing and advanced manufacturing in that—there is a place for us. In Germany there are about 400,000 jobs in the renewables sector. That is about 100,000 in Australian terms. And that is right across the spectrum—that is not just the people who put solar panels on your roof but it is the people who make the wind turbines. It is the people who lay the cables. It is people in manufacturing and especially in advanced manufacturing. In Germany they do not have to put up new wind turbines because, with their advanced manufacturing capacity, people are able to go back and retrofit existing turbines with new gears that generate between two and four times as much electricity from the same turbine. That is the kind of innovation and the kind of advanced manufacturing that this country is capable of. But it needs a plan and it needs a vision.

This government comes in here, saying, 'The only plan that is on the table at the moment is to support people as they transition out of an industry which is closing, and we're going to take that away without anything to put in its place.' In fact, it scorns the idea that you would possibly have a plan, because somehow a plan is something akin to a Stalinist command economy, whereas this government simply says, 'Let it rip and whatever happens, happens.' We are not going to be part of that.

Yes, we want to see Australia move to a clean energy future and, yes, we want to see Australia moving away from heavy reliance on cars to electric cars and public transport, but that is not this government's vision. This government is quite happy to prop up its mates at the big end of town if they will bankroll this government and everyone else can go hang. We will not support that. (Time expired)

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