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

I want to talk about the 2017-18 budget and its effects on South Australia. We all know South Australia has had a very rough time under this government in all its incarnations. In its first incarnation, the Abbott-Hockey incarnation, we know what happened there. First of all, it drove the car industry out of Australia. It drove out a billion dollars of investment in the Holden Elizabeth plant—it said no to that and was not at all interested in a billion dollars worth of investment which underpinned 10,000 auto jobs in South Australia. That is the first thing.

The second thing the government did is that they basically failed to build the supply ships that the Navy needs and is now purchasing from Spain, in South Australia. They thought that it would be better for our shipbuilding plan if, rather than get the supply ships and build them in South Australia, we were to have a valley of death, a very narrow one, and very quickly dissipate the workforce at ASC—and I know many of those people at ASC—only to build it up again when we came to build the OPVs and the frigates and the submarines.

We know that that schism in shipbuilding did not need to occur. The reason why it occurred was that the vandalism of Prime Minister Abbott's leadership continued over into Prime Minister Turnbull's leadership. We know that the same ideas, the same sort of 'Let's just wipe our industrial capacity off the map' occurred. The only reason we now have a national shipbuilding plan, and the only reason why we now see some action on continuous shipbuilding, is that Prime Minister Turnbull has been bullied, or dragooned, by Mr Pyne into doing it. That is the only reason why we now have a shipbuilding plan, because we know that that was not their intention. If it had been their intention to have continuous shipbuilding in South Australia—indeed, across the nation—they would have done the supply ships in Australia rather than sending them to Spain. It was an incredibly foolish decision. We know that former Prime Minister Abbott wanted to build the submarines in Japan. He wanted to purchase Japanese submarines and he wanted to have them made in Japan. This is the context in which we arrive at this budget.

The South Australian economy has had economic shock therapy. Rather than having the defibrillator out, they have attached the jumper leads to the South Australian economy and given us as many volts as they can—economic shock therapy to our industrial base. It is completely unnecessary in the automotive industry, which would have been exporting cars, with the dollar where it is, and it is completely unnecessary with shipbuilding and submarine building. All of that uncertainty, all of that economic mayhem, and South Australia is paying a disproportionate price for the actions of this government. Something worth thinking about is that if the investment decision for Holden had happened a year earlier or a year later we would still have a car industry in this country. It was simply a period of 18 months in which a government took leave of its senses—complete leave of its senses—and in the process caused economic mayhem in my state.

We roll round to federal budget 2017. On 8 May, I opened TheAdvertiser and there it was on the front page, the splash: 'Federal budget 2017: help on electricity prices, housing and $100 million for after Holden closes in SA'. This was obviously leaked to the papers, and I do not begrudge the government their splash. They are entitled to do that with their budget. It is standard operating procedure. We had a picture of Mr Morrison at his desk. A 'vote of confidence' was what the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Arthur Sinodinos, said about the post-Holden funding. It was all hopeful stuff. Then, of course, we had Mr Nick Xenophon who, in a rare moment of positivity, said:

It's great the government came on board to support this proposal for the fund. This $100 million will help turbocharge manufacturing in SA and Victoria in areas where it’s needed most.

So we had this splash to TheAdvertiserto Tory Shepherd, who is a very good journalist—and obviously the government and Senator Xenophon were a bit of a tag team on some mutually beneficial backslapping in the prelude to the budget.

If you were working at Holden, or you had worked at Holden, or you worked in components, or your kids worked in components, or if you were just a man or woman in the street, you could be forgiven, when you looked at that headline, for thinking: 'A hundred million dollars sounds like a lot of money. It sounds like they are finally reacting to the chaos that they have caused.' But, of course, this was a cruel hoax, because it is not $100 million; it is actually two lots of $50 million spread over five years. Then, by the time you aggregate the Victorian bit out from the South Australian bit it is actually $10 million a year. So, regarding this great headline, you would not have gotten the splash if it were $10 million, would you? $10 million for my state, which faces losing 7,000 to 9,000 jobs—it depends on where we are at the moment as the redundancies fall at Holden and as the redundancies fall in the components sector, and as the flow-on effects of that occur. That is what it is going to cost the South Australian economy. We are already starting to see it reflected in the northern suburbs in real estate prices and in economic activity in the area. It is very difficult. So, for the government to come along and say, '$100 million. Aren't we great. Pat us on the back. What a great budget. Here's a picture of me at my desk in Canberra,' and to have Senator Xenophon, who is supposedly the great champion of South Australia and is supposedly out there horse-trading and negotiating deals on our behalf.

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