Sean Edwards (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Secretary, thank you. What did they do? He said this morning that the coalition has a mandate—he agrees that we have a mandate—to abolish the carbon tax. What are those opposite doing? In this chamber they are stalling it.

What is going on in the car industry and what is going on with unions is completely dysfunctional. What has gone on? We have had 12e years of Labor in South Australia. Rabbits in the headlights, they are. We have a sector that has suffered with a high Australian dollar. What do Toyota, Holden and Ford—and Mitsubishi before them—have in common?—the cost of manufacturing. You heard from Senator Abetz: if the workforce had its way and if the unions had not stood in their way, there might have been another 2,000 working days on the floor each year. Now, that is productivity gain, but the workers were not allowed to do that. What happened to the car industry was systematic dysfunction. And what about the policy settings of the green car funds and the carbon tax? Then there was that $1.8 billion clanger—the FBT, just on the eve of the election. That worked! Cripple the industry by sending messages to the owners of these businesses about policy settings that the Labor Party provided the Australian environment. You were all over the place—'There'll be no carbon tax. We'll have green car funds; we'll put $1.2 billion into it. Oh, no, we won't; we can't balance the budget so we'll rip it out of there. Nobody will notice.' But they did notice. It was not on our watch; it was on your watch. You set the dysfunction in place, and you are totally responsible.

By the way, last week in South Australia we had Senator Farrell, who is leaving this place on 30 June, wanting to go to the northern suburbs of Adelaide to represent those poor people from Holden out there in the seat of Napier. What happened? There was a factional stitch up, and he was not allowed to. I quite like Senator Farrell; I have always found him to be a straight-shooting bloke. He wanted to introduce some intellect into that area. What do the members for Little Para, Newland, Playford, Light, Taylor and the current member for Napier have in common? Apart from being silent on this issue, they are all from the Labor Party. There has been 12 years of dysfunction in that area.

Senator Farrell wanted to go there to try to fix it, but Minister Michael O'Brien—not to be confused with our colleague in the Victorian Liberal Party—stood aside to let Senator Farrell come in. But what happened? The lefties stitched Senator Farrell up and snuffed out his political career. I feel he could have worked with the coalition government on arresting the dysfunction that Labor has put into the car industry.