Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I remind the Prime Minister that the position of steel industry advocate has now been vacant for nine months. I also remind the Prime Minister that her Steel Industry Innovation Council, the government's most important steel industry advisory body, has not met once in the past six months. If the Prime Minister really cares about the steel industry, why didn't she at least consult her peak advisory body about how to protect the jobs of BlueScope workers?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad we have shamed the Leader of the Opposition into asking a question about jobs. Unfortunately, he does not bother to keep himself up to date with these matters because he does not really care. If he had bothered to keep himself up to date with these matters instead of being paralysed, sitting there just thinking about muck and hypocrisy for a week, if he had done a day's work this week, he would have realised that Dennis O'Neill has been appointed as the next steel supplier advocate and Peter Beattie has been appointed as the country's first resource sector supplier envoy.

On the second part of the Leader of the Opposition's question he will continue—and this question is no doubt part of that campaign—to distort and misrepresent to the Australian people what the job losses at BlueScope were about. He is desperate to continue his fear and misrepresentation campaign so that even though this is about the jobs of 1,000 workers he will misrepresent to the Australian community that this is about carbon pricing. I directly engaged with the CEOs of the major steel companies. I did not go through a council, I did it myself. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and others have all been directly involved with the steel industry and we did that in order to get the Steel Transformation Plan right. And before the Leader of the Opposition continues this fear campaign and this misrepresentation, I would refer him to the words of the CEOs of those steel companies, where they very clearly said that the government had worked with them and had settled an outcome in carbon pricing and had heard their concerns. BlueScope, of course, said very, very upfront in relation to Monday's announcement, that it was not about carbon pricing. The government had worked with BlueScope, which is why we were able to make the announcements that we did on Monday, and we will continue to work with BlueScope.

The Leader of the Opposition sits there and at the moment he has got no plan at all to assist manufacturing. Indeed, he stands for cutbacks—half a million dollars out of the automobile industry assistance that has been provided. Of course he is bleating there about carbon tax. It has nothing to do with carbon pricing. This is $500 million of industry assistance that has been promised to the industry for a long period of time, and it would be ripped away. The Leader of the Opposition is going to face a big choice when this parliament resumes, because we will be bringing in here the Steel Transformation Plan. He has made an art form of standing next to blue-collar workers with a hard hat on and a high-vis vest and pretending that really he is working-class Tony. It will be very interesting to see whether or not the man from North Shore will put his hand up for steelworkers when the time comes.