Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (Senator Carr) to questions without notice asked today.

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research has once again highlighted the reason why he should not be in the ministry, let alone in the cabinet. His ineptness in question time today was highlighted by his incapacity to answer a single question that was put to him, other than one. It was this one: ‘Does the minister agree that Australian manufacturing is expected to continue its historical decline over coming decades?’ He was very definite on that. The answer was no—absolutely, no—and then he went on some tirade. Embarrassingly for this government, the statement that I included in my question was lifted word for word out of the Labor government authorised document on which the Labor Party seeks to build its emissions trading scheme.

So what we have had highlighted today is the Australian Labor Party in full flight with its spin—talking down manufacturing to promote its emissions trading scheme but talking up manufacturing when talking about industry. You see, the government cannot have it both ways. They speak to the Australian people with a forked tongue. They speak out of one side of their mouth when it comes to emissions trading and out of the other side of their mouth when it comes to the manufacturing sector. To use a term employed by the Prime Minister, he has to level with the Australian people and actually tell them what the government believe. You cannot have this spin, which is so diametrically opposed in two separate portfolio areas. The government have to bring the spin together and tell us what the actual substance is. Either they support the Treasury modelling, and therefore say that that is a sound foundation for their emissions trading scheme, or they reject it—as Senator Carr, the minister for industry, did during question time—and thereby undermine their whole emissions trading scheme.

But of course it does not come as a surprise to those of us on this side of the chamber that Senator Carr has got himself into this great difficulty, because these people only consider spin; they are never worried about substance. A new car plan for a greener future is a wonderful 21-page document, we are told—until you realise that page 2 is blank, page 4 is blank and page 12 is blank. They have put blank pages in this document to try to pad it out a bit, to try to give it substance. But when you ask, ‘Where is the substance?’ there is a chapter called ‘The details’. I started to get excited. I thought ‘The details’ would put some meat onto the bones. So in this 21-page document—in fact, it is only an 18-page document—the details are contained not in 12 pages or 15 pages but in three pages, in a chapter called ‘The details’ on pages 9, 10 and 11. So Labor say to the Australian people, ‘We have the details in three pages for the spending of $6.2 billion’—that is at the rate of over $2 billion per page. And the government say, ‘We’ve got a serious plan for the car industry.’ Of course they do not—and they know it. That is why this pathetic document has to be padded out with three blank pages, to try to make it weighty—to give it some weight in the event that somebody actually were to put it onto a set of scales. Of course, the real scale that this document is going to be weighed on and measured against is that of its results. We had the minister claiming all sorts of wonderful results today—and we will keep him to that.

But I will return to the point on which I started, and it is this: the government have today been caught out by their own overspinning. Sure, they love taking the egg beater to any issue and trying to whip it up, but today the meringue has collapsed on them. It has absolutely collapsed on them, and in fact it is all over Senator Carr’s face because he spun a bit too much and what he said today in question time is a complete contradiction of that which the government is relying on to sell its emissions trading scheme. I invite the Prime Minister to intervene to sort out this mess, to give some certainty to the car industry and also some certainty to the government’s approach to the emissions trading scheme.