Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for the reminder. I certainly will do so. I was pointing out that the distortion in the tax system which occurred under the member for Higgins, the former Treasurer, was such that he shifted the tax away from income and onto company profits dependent upon Australia remaining a quarry where we dig things up, cut them down and ship them overseas, and we hollow out the manufacturing sector; we do not invest in education and training, we do not invest in innovation, we do not invest in research and development. We made the country totally vulnerable to a collapse in the mining boom and that is what has occurred.

Look around the country and see which jobs are going. It is not because workers are not productive; it is because the former government failed to recognise the sectors that were uncompetitive into the future. Here was the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins, Mr Costello, giving $62 million to Ford to build six-cylinder cars in Australia when it was very clear that nobody wanted to buy them and that $62 million was not tied to energy efficient design. It was not tied to vehicle fuel efficiency standards. The result is that workers have been put out of work because those companies are no longer competitive. Whilst they were no longer competitive, their bosses were skirting off with massive exit payments that were grossly unfair. So not only did they take the profits but also they undermined the capacity of workers to have work in the long term. By setting low standards and failing to see the trends of the future, they condemned their workforce to unemployment as countries like China set high vehicle fuel efficiency standards, establishing themselves a competitive advantage in the global marketplace, and now they continue to make cars, whereas Ford is going out the back door.

The car industry is a classic case of our complete failure to have an industry policy for this country. If we had recognised that the trend was to move to addressing long-term security in employment by shifting to a low-carbon economy, we would now have factories in Australia that were producing photovoltaic panels, for example. We would have factories in Australia producing wind turbines. We would have factories producing all manner of things in Australia, and we would have a workforce that had been helped to make the transition. There would have been investment in research and development, commercialisation and training. There would have been rollouts on a mass scale, and we would have those jobs in Australia today. My biggest criticism of the Howard government was the vulnerability that they left the Australian economy in while celebrating rivers of gold and manna from heaven as they gave out tax cuts hand over fist. They failed to invest in infrastructure, health and education. They failed to invest in economically productive infrastructure.