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

In sadness and anger I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) to a question without notice asked by Senator Macdonald today relating to Cement Australia in Rockhampton, Queensland.

The sadness is because tonight 32 Rockhampton families will be facing the bleak prospect of unemployment, of the main breadwinner of the family being without a job. I congratulate Cement Australia for, in their announcement of the shutting of the Rockhampton plant, indicating that alternative jobs within the company will be offered and that any employee choosing not to accept an alternative job will receive their full entitlements as well as retraining assistance, if required. The jobs in other parts of Cement Australia would not be in Rockhampton, and that means 32 families will face the prospect of being unemployed or packing up all of their belongings, selling their houses and moving to a distant town.

I speak in anger because it was all so avoidable. The disaster that has befallen the cement industry in Australia was predicted in any one of the four Senate inquiries into the Rudd government’s CPRS proposal. This statement from the Cement Industry Federation Australia, which was tabled in the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy, predicted exactly what happened. I asked Senator Wong in question time whether she bothered to read the evidence, whether she bothered to have serious negotiations with the cement industry and whether she understood what her proposal was doing to those factories and to the people employed in them. Senator Wong, of course, did not answer the question but started prattling on about clinker getting the 90 per cent assistance. The cement industry, in all of the submissions they made to the government and to Senate inquiries, said that they could get by with 90 per cent if it were for the whole industry—not just the clinker part. I am not sure if Senator Wong ever understood that. Clinker is not the cement industry; it is a part of the process. But Senator Wong and the government are so arrogant that they were not prepared to listen to the pleas of the industry.

In their submission, the Cement Industry Federation said this about the decay in the assistance—that is, the rundown in assistance after the first years. They said:

The Australian cement industry can only remain competitive if the assistance rate for EITE industries remains constant until a global scheme is implemented. The decay of the assistance rate will diminish the competitiveness of the Australian cement industry leading to the premature closure of production facilities and deter new investment which contradicts the commitment made by the—

Labor—

Government in the 2007 election campaign to not disadvantage EITE industries.

It was all predicted there. We were all told what was going to happen, regrettably, in Rockhampton today. One can only surmise that there will be other closures around Australia in the future. The industry cannot compete with this sort of taxing. It is the fear of what Labor will do that is causing the lack of investment and has caused this plant in Rockhampton to shut down today. Already, in evidence to committees, Cement Australia have told us that their $750 million new plant proposed for Gladstone would not go ahead because of investment uncertainty. This is a double blow for Rockhampton. I am not sure what the Labor member, Kirsten Livermore, is doing about it. The meat factory in Rockhampton will face the same outcome if this proposal from the Labor government goes ahead. (Time expired)