Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Skills and Training) Share this | Hansard source

That was a very interesting interjection because who could forget the former Liberal-National government goading a car company to leave our shores? That's exactly what happened because of the efforts of the previous Liberal government. Of course, they've never supported the car industry and they actually said that governments shouldn't support the industry, which makes it rather bizarre that they want to tip hundreds of billions of dollars into a risky, expensive, state-owned nuclear reactor situation. Effectively, the opposition is saying that 'We couldn't support the car industry, but we can actually invest hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars into nuclear reactors.' Well, what a remarkable turnaround by those opposite. The fact is, we need to invest in areas of demand and we need to invest in the manufacturing sector. That's why we introduced fee-free TAFE. We've now had more than 400,000 Australians enrol in fee-free TAFE in areas such as the energy sector, the manufacturing sector, the IT sector and more. We need to ensure we match those skills—

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