Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Minister, for the answer to at least one of my questions. I reject your statement that the previous government ran down the car industry. Even accepting your argument, which I do not, the question would be: so why are you making it worse? Why are you adding to it? I thought yours was the party of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. It was not long ago that Minister Carr was lamenting the number of working families who would not have a breadwinner because of the slowdown in the motor vehicle manufacturing industry, and here you are exacerbating it—taxing Australian cars and giving breaks to imported cars. You did answer my question—you have done no modelling and you have made no assessment. I could add to that that you do not seem to be terribly interested in those who might lose their jobs as a result of this. Thank you for answering it anyhow. Thank you for your answer on the one vehicle per year. But you did not answer the other part of my question: why is one car per year good but two cars per year bad, three cars per year bad or 12 vehicles per year bad?

These vehicles are fairly expensive when you buy them in these areas up in the north-west—for all the right reasons; I am not suggesting that sellers are making a bigger profit, but there are a lot of costs in getting the vehicles there. So a lot of farmers do a deal on a bulk purchase. Those vehicles get fairly well used—a lot of them would do over 100,000 kilometres in one year. Many farmers—and farmers are businessman—make the assessment that it is better to trade them in at 100,000 kilometres rather than wait till 500,000 kilometres, when perhaps you would not get much of a trade-in. So they trade them in. They also do deals with the dealer. They may say, ‘If we buy one, what is the cost; if we buy three, what is the cost; if we buy five, what is the cost?’

I again emphasise that if you are running a farm in some of these remote areas then having one vehicle is just a joke—in many instances, five vehicles is the norm. I have seen upwards of 12 just on the farm area when I happened to be there, and half of them would have been out somewhere else. They are a sort of workhorse—in fact, they replaced horses. In the old days you would probably ride a horse out to see what was happening. Now you need these vehicles with all of these enhancements. The Labor Party has an answer on why uranium from three mines is good but from four mines is bad. You have an answer on that—it is not very convincing. But I do not want to mix the subject matter here. Can you just tell me why it is okay for one primary production vehicle but for any more you pay this huge tax rip-off?