Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I commence my contribution today with a thought for the families who yesterday got the bad news from Toyota about their jobs. As I have mentioned before in this place, I have had personal experience of similar bad news in my family, and I do not think—despite the implications of some of those opposite—that there is a single person in this place who does not feel for people who have to go home and tell their families about the news they got yesterday at Toyota or last year at Holden or before that at Ford—or, might I add, before that at Mitsubishi; or before that at Nissan in Dandenong in the early 1990s; or at International Trucks; or at the Ford plant which used to be in the western suburbs of Sydney; or at the Leyland and Valiant plants which used to be in Melbourne. We always feel for those people.

We are hearing from a Labor Party which I do not recognise as the same one that existed in my youth. As the former Prime Minister John Howard outlined, the process of ending protection and exposing Australia to the global economy—the economic liberalisation which has seen Australia become, if not a perfect economy, an economy which has withstood more shocks than any comparable economy around the world—in many ways started while the Labor Party were in office in the 1980s. The arguments which I have heard put here by Senator Carr and by Senator Gallacher are the very arguments which were completely dismissed, demolished, attacked and repudiated by people such as Bob Hawke and Paul Keating during their terms in government. It shows you how far the modern-day Labor Party have come that they put forward arguments in this place which many of them would remember were repudiated in the course of their own time in parliament or as active members of the Labor Party.

In spite of all the attempts at partisanship and crocodile tears opposite, let us look at Labor's record. In the last two years, as they chopped and changed, Labor broke promises worth nearly $1.5 billion in funding for car industry policies. That is a record unbeaten even by the previous, chaotic government. Senator Kim Carr in his book criticised the government of which he was a member, when he was a minister, for cutting the Green Car Innovation Fund. He wrote:

Unfortunately the Green Car Innovation Fund was abolished, leaving international company executives wondering just what they had to do to get a consistent government policy commitment in Australia.

That statement did not come from someone on this side; it came from the person who was the Labor minister concerned and who opened the debate on this matter of public importance. Two years ago Prime Minister Gillard announced $34 million in funding for Ford and said that it would create 300 new jobs. Yet 330 people lost their jobs eight months later—so it was just a cash handover. In March 2012, Prime Minister Gillard announced $215 million in funding for Holden and, with Premier Wetherill of South Australia, said the funding would 'secure Holden's future in Australia until 2022.' This was either incompetence or an intentional fabrication, because the evidence says otherwise.

Now we get to the bigger issue: the accusation by Senator Carr that somehow the loss of jobs at Toyota is the result of an ideological crusade by the government. I am going to quote the father, in many ways, of the liberalisation agenda which has seen Australia have such a strong economy. Bert Kelly, the former member for Wakefield, was accused of being an ideologue. But, when he was arguing against things such as tariffs, he said:

I do not dread government intervention . . . for ideological reasons. It is just because they are such messers.

Labor's history in the industrial portfolio illustrates the truth of this statement. They handed over cheque after cheque and all the while made not a whit of difference to prevent the downsizing of automotive companies in Australia. What Senator Carr will not reveal to the Senate and the Australian people is the limit for the Labor Party. At what point will they stop writing cheques? How much will the Labor Party contribute? How much will they hand over to other companies to protect a smaller number of jobs than were lost at Toyota? Their record is of abject failure.

It is time to say, despite the phrase 'co-investment' having come into common use through various people seeking government money and through the Greens and the Labor Party over the last few years, that there is no such thing as co-investment. If the taxpayer puts money into a corporation, they do not get a dividend, a say in running the company, the ability to turn up to the AGM, or a vote on the remuneration report of the directors. There is no such thing as co-investment; it is a subsidy. Call it what it is and have the courage to mount the argument for it. We do subsidise some things in this country, but we do it on the honest terms of saying, 'This is an activity worth subsidising,' either for social reasons or, more rarely, for economic reasons. The term 'co-investment' for certain kinds of funding is being used by certain people who want to hide the fact that such funding amounts to subsidies for corporate operations.

We heard this afternoon in question time from the Greens, the party which bleats about corporate welfare and which, in our local governments and in the states, does everything it can to stop people using cars—including in the area where I live—by advocating things such as higher car taxes and congestion charges, all of which make the use of private motor vehicles harder. Yet they come in here and criticise the government for defending the taxpayer. Every cent that was available to the car industry six months ago is available now, but what is not being revealed by those opposite—and this was examined in detail in estimates—is that the accounting measure for the ATS and the $500 million mentioned by Senator Kim Carr was funding for future years, which was not being used because the volumes of car manufacturers had fallen so far. In other words, the ATS is partly a volume-based program. The same amount of money was available to GM and Ford this week as there was in December and as there was in July.

This government is trying to remove barriers to manufacturing—those costs imposed by those opposite, in concert with their Greens allies, that make manufacturing in Australia more expensive. Why on earth, no matter how marginal the cost, would we impose an internal energy tariff—the carbon tax—on every manufacturer in Australia? What it goes to show is that those opposite have absolutely no experience in business. In business, it is about the marginal choices you make. It is how you shave margins that is the difference between success and failure. It is how you shave half a per cent off an energy bill. It is how you shave off a tiny bit of the cost of complying with one of the new regulations brought in by the Labor Party and the Greens—such as the national OH&S laws, which made it harder for every smaller manufacturer around the country.

But the Labor Party do not understand that. They say, 'Oh, it is insignificant.' That betrays their complete lack of experience in running a business and employing people. Everyone who has been involved with or worked in a small business where you get to know your boss, on a farm or in any other form of small enterprise, knows that it is the marginal decisions that make the difference between success and failure. Those opposite do not understand that and that is why they do not care.

I also want to highlight the numbers being used by those opposite. We have heard them time and time again. I turn first to the comparison between the level of subsidy to the motor manufacturing industry in Australia and the level of subsidy in other countries. This idea that Australia has the lowest level of subsidy—because Labor are measuring it on a per capita basis—is a farce. According to the measure used by those opposite, if Australia took the current amount of subsidy and produced only one car with it, we would still have the lowest level of subsidy in the world for car manufacturing—because you are measuring per head of population. I will repeat that. The Labor Party are measuring the level of subsidy based on the number of people in Australia, not the number of cars we produce. Using the Labor Party's measure, the level of subsidy if we only produced one car would be exactly the same as if we produced 100,000 cars. It is a flawed measure and they know it.

When you compare subsidy levels based on subsidy per unit of car production, we have the highest level of subsidy in the world. What the Labor Party will not tell us is how much higher it needs to be. Instead, we get this empty rhetoric, this venal political campaign that does not respect the sacrifices of those who have already lost their jobs in the decades of restructuring that started under Labor. It is all about politics and an attempt to find a diversion from the other issues which face the Labor Party, particularly their union mates. (Time expired)