John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The demise of Australia's car industry will impact this country, including my home state of Victoria, enormously. We are watching the death throes of manufacturing. As this happens I worry for our workers, for their families and for the small businesses that are part of the automotive supply chain. The impact of the loss of Toyota, which follows closely similar announcements by Holden and Ford, goes beyond the economic. This is not about pie charts and statistics or about GDP and economic theory—the stuff of so many speeches in this place. This issue—the future of manufacturing in my home state of Victoria—is about people. It is about real people, real skills, real jobs. It is about how people will put food on their tables, pay their mortgages and rents and raise their families. It is about how the fallout of failure will change the face of our communities and how those changes may affect the stability and cohesiveness of those communities.

Our government has failed the people of Victoria and the people of Australia, and what is our future, with an estimated 50,000 jobs in the balance? We only have to look at America to see a snapshot of what we will face if things continue this way. According to a recent report, the number of American workers who are low-wage and low-income earners jumped 94 per cent from 1979 to 2011, reaching 20.9 million workers. That means that one in seven US workers lives in a household whose main source of income is a low-paying job such as working as a retail sales assistant or a fast-food restaurant cashier. For a long time I have been warning of similar likely outcomes in Australia unless our government acts with urgency and with vision. Will thousands more Australian workers and their families be left to barely survive in low-wage, casual jobs—jobs with no certainty, with no sick pay, with no holiday pay and with little or no future? What are the Abbott government's plans for the post-manufacturing Australian economy? Jobs are not simply created or invented out of thin air. It is research and development that will create the jobs of the future. Our manufacturers need encouragement, support and a clear, bipartisan policy approach. They are looking for their government to act in Australia's interests. The great countries of the world manufacture goods; they do not survive simply by digging holes in the ground, by turning their country into a nation of drink waiters or by educating their competitors on how to bury them.

We need our manufacturing research and development industries here in Australia to provide for our future. Simply put, if we keep exporting these industries, we are exporting our future and that of future generations. I call for the government to step up on this issue, to tell us what its plan is for manufacturing in my home state of Victoria and the rest of the country, because I hate to think of the alternative if things are allowed to drift further in the current direction.