Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was just looking through the minister's website; it does have some really good pictures up of his tour of GM Holden on 2 October 2013. They are still up there. I remember touring the plant with him and many other Liberal senators and Liberal backbenchers. I think the member for Hindmarsh was good enough to arrive. Amongst all of his attacks about the ABC, my party and all the rest of it, I did note one thing that the minister said about exports. In particular, there are a couple of questions I have. First of all, as the cabinet deliberations went on between the minister's tour of the GM plant on 2 October and the announcement of closure on 12 December, did that delay affect the company's decision? Did those internal deliberations of the cabinet and the battle that he fought with the Treasurer and others affect the company's decision and his opinion?

I have another question. In the announcement by Mike Devereux from Holden about the company, they talked about a perfect storm. One of the factors in that perfect storm was the price of the Australian dollar which, I think, at the time was around $1.07—around that mark. It had been there for quite some time. It was, I think, one of the very real problems affecting manufacturing in not just cars but also wine, or anybody else who was manufacturing and exporting at that time. It was a very big consideration in their economic performance. Given that the dollar is now at 77c, does the minister agree that we have come out of the other side of that perfect storm that Australian manufacturing had been facing? Does he consider the fact that if the company and the government were considering the same set of circumstances today they might well make a different decision, and that manufacturing might well have continued in Australia if the decisions in cabinet had been different and if people had been able to look a little bit further down the track on the Australian dollar? They are the very real questions I am asking of him.

I am asking his opinion about the time line on which the government made decisions at that point and its inability to see past that perfect storm which was making car manufacturing and exporting very difficult. We know that if the dollar falls below 90c then car exports can occur very effectively to, say, the police car market in the United States. We know that many police forces in the United States wanted to buy the Holden Caprice that was modified for the police car market. We know that the only thing that was making them uncompetitive in those markets was the value of the Australian dollar, which was a temporary thing. I would be very interested to know the minister's opinion. If we were making those decisions now, and if the company were making those decisions now, does he think that things might well be different?

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