Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to talk about the Automotive Transformation Scheme Amendment Bill 2014, which is going to have huge impacts across the state I come from, Victoria, particularly in the northern suburbs with the closure of Ford, Holden and Toyota.

This government comes in with this mantra that the age of entitlement is over, so it is pulling funding from the automotive industry, which will spell disaster for many people in manufacturing and automotive sectors and for the supply chains that supply the three manufacturers in this country. What we have heard over the last couple of days is the government saying: 'It's all good. They've got to stand on their own two feet. They've got to look after themselves and, if they're not competitive, we shouldn't be supporting them.' They say that subsidies are outdated and we should not be subsidising industry, but at the same time they pump billions of dollars a year into the mining industry subsidies. Wherever you look across the country, there are subsidies in a whole range of things: banking, child care, private health insurance—all these things are subsidised by taxpayers because they are important to our country.

We are one of only 13 countries around the world that manufacture our own cars, and our own cars are of a very high standard. I remember growing up as a kid near the Ford factory, seeing the new models roll out and seeing the improvements that each model made in safety and comfort, all these things that happened over time. Today's modern car has just about everything you want bar a coffee machine. It is the development work that has been done by workers in this country who put together these motor vehicles.

I can remember the Prime Minister's exact words from before the election. I will quote him:

I want to see car-making survive in this country, not just survive but flourish.

That was what now Prime Minister Abbott said on 21 August 2013. He wanted to make it flourish. So what does he do? He pulls the money and support out, pulls out the strength behind the industry. Roughly $18 per car goes into it. He pulls that away, and in the end we have all three manufacturers walk away.

With Holden we have seen executives come out and say they are not manufacturing cars in Australia any more because we had the cigar-chomping Treasurer up there in his leadership spiel threatening and goading Holden to leave. He said: 'Go on, go. Leave if that's what you want to do.' And they did because they lost the support of the Australian government to manufacture cars.

We have been manufacturing cars in Australia for a long time. We invented the world's first ute. We have cars that have delivered safety standards right across the world, and components that we manufacture go right around the world, but they have always relied on having a strong, solid car industry here. Those opposite sit there and say the component manufacturers can still make their products with no problem. The problem is that, if you take from any business their largest source of income, which is local production—take away the thousands of components they make every year that go into our motor cars—their business case is not sustainable. We have seen that happen with in Gisborne with air conditioning components. You cannot take the base product away from a company and expect it to be able to manufacture. The cost base is not there. That is what happens.

We have people in the car industry—good, hardworking people who have worked a long time and are very proud of the products they make and deliver—who have been doing that for many years, and the question has to be what happens to those people. A 50-year-old manufacturer who has been working on a car assembly line all his life—where is he going to go? What is he going to do for a living? They on the other side say there will be new jobs and everyone will have a new job. It does not work that way. You would think that a party that claims to be the friend of business would have that basic understanding. These are highly technical jobs, and what this government has done by ripping out the car industry support is put many small businesses and jobs in small businesses at risk.

An example is a company that I know quite well. They do a little tiny part of the car industry: they service the cranes on the Toyota line. It is probably 0.1 per cent of Toyota's manufacturing process. It is a small business. You would think the Minister for Small Business would be standing up for these people, but he is not. They are now going to have to put off seven employees because that type of work is not going to be made available. That is one tiny company. That means seven families are going to lose their incomes.

They will tell you there are a few thousand automotive manufacturing workers gone and that is it. That is the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is all the surrounding industries: the truck drivers who move the parts, the forklift drivers, the repairmen, the salesmen at truck manufacturing companies that sell the trucks that do these things. There are also the caterers, the cleaners, the engineers, the tool specialists plus all the service work that gets done The list goes on and on.

We saw it with Nissan. One member opposite said yesterday that Ford announced its closure and sales dipped. Yes it did dip. Blind Freddie could see that it was going to dip. Once a company announces it is pulling out of Australia, the sales drop off. It happened with Nissan when Nissan pulled out of Australia. They went to almost no sales at all. They have been able to maintain a small slice of the market but not the big slice of the market that they used to have. Once the message is out that we are not manufacturing the cars in Australia, people think, 'Well, maybe we're not buying them.' Maybe there is going to be an issue getting parts, service or those sorts of things. That is why Ford and Holden have had dips in sales. But also remember that four of the top 10 selling cars in this country are Australian made.

People like their Fords, Holdens and Toyotas. They like Australian made cars because they know the quality is good. The quality is so good that Holden had a great export program selling the Caprice and Statesman to the United States as police cars. That was a really big boost for Holden sales but that was when the Australian dollar was at 85 or 86 US cents, so they manufactured the cars and made the sales at that price. When the Australian dollar went to US$1.06 it was not profitable, and Holden was you losing money hand over fist. That program had to stop. If you ask people in the United States who have used the Statesman cars as police cars they will tell you that they are fantastic motor vehicles—better than the old Ford Crown Victoria that the police were lumbered with for many decades because of protectionism in the US market.

We strongly oppose this legislation because it means the death knell for the automotive industry in this country. I worked in the automotive industry for 15 years and I know just how important this is and how big a reach it has right across our economy. There are many people in the Ford, Holden and Toyota factories who have been left in disbelief of this government because what it said before the election was totally opposite to what it did after the election.

That has come across with a whole range of things. Prior to the debate on this bill we spent half an hour learning how Labor, standing up for pensioners, has forced this government to back down on the pension cuts—cuts they said, before the election, that they would never do. What did they do in their first budget? Bang!—they snipped the indexation for aged pensioners. They put pensioners on the scrap heap.

What this government have done affects young kids who lose their jobs—those in the automotive industry are a perfect example. If you are a 29-year-old with a family, buying a house and trying to start your life together, and you lose your job because this government made a decision to scrap the car industry—they scrapped the support to keep the car industry going—you would be out of work and this government was proposing that you would not get benefits for up to six months. Thanks to the good, hard work of Labor and the Australian people that is not going to happen.

The question has to be asked: how is someone going to pay their rent, put food on the table and pay their bills? This government has no interest in manufacturing. It has no interest in the automotive sector. It has shown that it has no interest in vulnerable people. Whether you are an aged pensioner or a young person this government has you in its sights. We need to keep fighting and make sure that we stop that.

There is no doubt that, in workplaces in this day and age, there is an element of ageism. If you are in your fifties and you are going for a job it is very difficult. I have people coming into my office every day of the week—good people who have worked their whole lives, buying a house, raising a family and doing the right thing—who, when they lose their jobs, find it difficult. They can go for 30 or 40 jobs and not get put on. They know damn well that it is because of their age.

When people lose jobs in the automotive sector this scheme was to help them develop skills to try and find a job in a new industry. This is the second biggest drop in a single industry that we have seen since the Ansett collapse. The difference with the Ansett collapse was that a lot of people found more work in the industry. It did not matter if you went to Tiger, Jetstar, Virgin or Qantas; you could fix the planes—they were the same sorts of jobs. But in automotive manufacturing you do not have that opportunity. This is an industry that is closing, not a big player.

This government should be condemned because even an organisation—not traditional Labor people—such as the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries have spoken about this. Yesterday, one member on the opposite side of the chamber said, 'We shouldn't need to listen to industry. Why should we? We'll make the decisions.' I said yesterday, and I will say it today: that is arrogance personified.

The Federation of Automotive Products Manufacturers have said :

The government continues to press on with the amendment bill knowing that a reduction in ATS funding will put in jeopardy up to 30,000 jobs in the component industry …

ABS figures show that in Victoria one per cent of the workforce will be gone; in South Australia it is 0.6 per cent. Then you have to look at the potential rolling impact on the vehicle manufacturing sector. The flat-earth policies of the free-trade think tanks, who opined that subsidies should be removed at all costs, invariably do not offer a solution. Those think tanks do not have a solution to the deindustrialisation and large-scale unemployment that their prescription of flat-earth policies will eventually bring.

The issue here is that there has been a quick, simple decision of the government to say, 'Let's remove this. We'll take the money out of the automotive industry, jobs and small business, and we will put it aside so that people earning $100,000 a year can get $50,000 from the government for having a baby.' It is just ridiculous.

The priorities of this government are screwed. The government really need to come back to earth and realise what they are doing to people right across country as they take away jobs, investment, support and, most importantly, confidence. If people do not have confidence they tighten their belts. When they tighten their belts it retracts the economy and the whole economy goes backwards. It is all because of a decision made by this government. The decision was not based on any policy or any factual evidence; it was based on ideology. The coalition do not care; they have never cared. The problem is that it will be ordinary Australians who pay for this government's bad decisions and bad governance.

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