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

I repeat, Senator Abetz: if you want to go to the question of motive, why you are doing this, I think it is a legitimate point to argue. You say you support the automotive industry and the 200,000 associated jobs—the 200,000 Australians who earn their living from it—and you support it because it makes such a huge contribution to this country’s research and development and such an enormous contribution to our exports. You say you support all that, but you do the very thing that you know will most undermine that industry.

Senator Abetz, what you are seeking to do is appeal to that right-wing element in the Liberal Party that actually hates this industry, that is fundamentally hostile to this industry. You want to appeal to the editorial writers in the Financial Review and the Australian. It will not save you from the problems you are facing in terms of your approach to your job, the Grech matter or anything else. It will not save you one little bit, because people will go to the heart of what you are really about, and you are about undermining this industry. You are about undermining investment, you are about undermining confidence and you are about undermining jobs for Australians. And this is at the time of the worst possible economic circumstances this industry has had to face since it began in this country—the worst possible circumstances, when competition is at its fiercest and when the difficulties faced by this industry are the most acute.

The fact that we have actually come through this crisis in the shape that we have is down to this government’s ability to work effectively with the industry, so that General Motors Holden has not been treated the way that Opel has, or the way in which we have seen the Scandinavian subsidiaries of Ford treated. Why has that happened? It is because we have been able to develop the appropriate partnerships and get the investment we need—and that is against the determined opposition of people like you, Senator Abetz, and other conservatives within the media who have a fundamental hostility towards the automotive industry and the people who work in it. Be under no illusion, Senator; you will be held responsible for this. You will bear the consequences of your hostility. You cannot speak out of both sides of your mouth simultaneously, because you will be found out.

Senator Abetz, you take a sharply different view from your leader in this place and that is well known. Senator Minchin made a statement on 14 December 2002 and he was not thanked for this then. Mr Costello was furious with this statement because he shared your views and hostility towards the automotive industry. Senator Minchin made the point:

Economies of our size would kill to have the sort of car industry we have got and we would be mad to do anything to unduly put that at risk.

That is exactly what you are doing here today. You asked me on what authority do I say that entitlements grants are different from discretionary grants. Why don’t you have a look at regulation 3A of the Financial Management  and Accountability Act? It clearly defines what a grant is and distinguishes it from an entitlement payment. That is what we are doing here.

Senator Abetz, I know you think you are a bit of a Perry Mason and you have come up with some killer point but what you have sought to do is aim a bullet at the heart of the industry in the name of a populist claim about disclosure and transparency. You are only too happy to work in the interests of our foreign competitors to achieve that outcome. You are only too happy to work in the interests of those who are seeking to undermine this industry. You seem to have this view that motor cars grow on trees. Where do they come from?

Governments all around the world provide assistance to the automotive industry because they know its importance. We are one of 15 countries in the world that has the capability to go from the point of inspiration right through to the showroom floor. How do we do that? Senator Abetz, you seemed to have failed to understand the basic lessons on how a country of our size achieves this. How do we achieve that? How do we sustain the 200,000 Australians earning their living out of this? How do we sustain the production of vehicles of world-class standard? We do not do that by playing political games with the lives of Australians. Senator Minchin understood the principle; you do not. I ask you to talk to your colleagues from South Australia and see what they have got say about the consequences of what you are seeking to do.

You are suggesting to us that tax concessions are not grants because they are entitlements. I could not agree more. Payments made under the ATS are not grants, in the sense that they are entitlement payments and not covered by the Senate standing order. The points you quoted from Mr Albanese were from the government’s announcement for stronger guidelines for the Competitive Grants Program to overcome the corruption that you built into the regional rorts program. That is right—they were about regional grants. They had to be strengthened because of the way in which your government acted in the regional rorts campaign, which demonstrated your total culpability when it came to the alleged disclosure of your political partisanship in rorting a discretionary grants scheme.

That is why we want those disclosed and why we have strengthened the guidelines. That is exactly what this government is doing. We are strengthening transparency but we understand the difference between a competitive grants scheme and an entitlements scheme. We understand that there is genuine commercial-in-confidence information. That is why I do not reveal the detail of every conversation I have with companies in this country. I would hazard a guess that the reason that Mr Macfarlane followed the same practice is because he had the same advice that I had: that to do the contrary is going to kill jobs. Your search for the cheap headline is about killing jobs.