Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the committee does not insist on the Senate amendment disagreed to by the House of Representatives.

How things have changed. In 2002, Senator Minchin said that ‘economies our size would kill to have the sort of car industry we have and that we would be mad to do anything to put it unduly at risk’.

Today, madness reigns. Far from killing for the car industry, the opposition is now trying to wring the life out of it. There is a lot I could say about the Liberal Party’s double standards, its political point-scoring and its indifference to the security and the wellbeing of working Australians, but frankly I think the people of this country will figure that out for themselves.

Instead, let me talk about the radical departure from practice of those opposite and focus on the facts about this legislation. The opposition says that the Automotive Transformation Scheme lacks transparency. They are wrong, plain wrong. In the last year and a half, I have made assistance to the car industry more transparent than it ever was during the 12 years of Liberal Party rule.

In 2007-08, for the first time ever, my department published a breakdown of support provided by the previous government’s Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme. Last night, we heard a lecture from the member for Groom, a lecture about the question of transparency. He had the power to publish the information when he was minister. He had that power since 2003 and he never used it. Not once did the Liberals in government provide the level of disclosure that this government has already provided. We have made ACIS more transparent. We have finetuned the legislation to make the Automotive Transformation Scheme more transparent again. Those amendments have already been accepted by both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

We are proposing that my department’s annual report include the total amounts of capped and uncapped assistance paid to participants in the scheme each year. This is appropriate for a program that provides structural support for strategic investment in research and development and in plant and equipment and the production of motor cars. The disclosure requirements are different for programs that award grants for specific projects, such as the Green Car Innovation Fund. Senator Abetz has tried to blur this distinction with his remarks in this chamber and outside. The opposition is proposing that the government should report assistance to individual companies.

I come back to the question: why didn’t they do this when they were in government? They had the power to do it. Why didn’t they act on it? Not once did they disclose this information. Why not, if it was such a red-hot idea then? Not once did they come close to providing the level of detail this government has provided since last year. We are told by the opposition that the big change all comes down to the imaginary difference between a cash and a duty credit scheme. They say that there was no need to give people that level of information when they were in government because the ACIS only dispensed credits, not cash. That is pure humbug, complete and total nonsense.

ACIS duty credits worked like cash. Each one of them had a face value, a dollar value. Companies amassed these credits and used them to offset the customs duty payable for vehicles and components imported into Australia. If they had more credits than they needed, they sold them. The credits were tradeable. In other words, they converted the credits directly into dollars and cents and the opposition knows that perfectly well. They have always talked about the cash value of ACIS—always. You never, ever heard a Liberal minister say that it was a credit scheme. We always heard that the scheme was at a cash value.

When announcing the current scheme in 2002, Minister Macfarlane boasted it would ‘deliver $4.2 billion to the industry over 10 years’. That is what he said in every public statement he made on the scheme. Now the opposition is suggesting that we need one level of disclosure for cash and a much lower level of disclosure for an instrument that functions in every material aspect exactly like cash. Quite clearly, the opposition’s arguments are self-serving nonsense. They are demanding more transparency from Labor than they provided themselves because our scheme offers cash payments. They are demanding it simply to try to get a cheap populist headline because of their inherent hostility to the automotive industry, because of their contempt for jobs in this industry, because of their contempt for investment in this industry and because of their failure to understand the significance of this industry to the Australian economy, particularly in Victoria and South Australia. The Liberals profess to understand business, but their proposal is an anathema to business.

Project grants are competitive. Applications are assessed, and decisions by government to fund projects are made on merit. That is what we do with the Green Car Innovation Fund moneys. Project applications are published and recognised because of their competitive nature. The ATS is an entitlement scheme. The ATS partially reimburses participants for their investments in innovation, modernisation and the production of passenger motor vehicles. The total amount provided to the car manufacturers to component producers, toolers and the automotive services sector for each ATS will be disclosed, but we will not be providing the business plans of every one of the 193 companies that participate in this scheme. As the federation of automatic products manufacturers have explained—