Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Do not believe the minister when he claims that they are failing projects. The AWDs remain within their funding envelope. The LHDs are on track to be delivered in 2014 and 2016. The Labor government invested heavily to provide industry with the means to recover the skills lost during the Howard years and to steadily improve productivity. But this government wants to junk this investment and these jobs.

I will take that interjection from Senator Birmingham because it is true, Senator Birmingham, that the Howard government—on one of the very few occasions—had a forward vision on this. They accepted that we needed to start the program; they accepted that that would be because we were starting from scratch and we had to upskill an entire sector so we were ready for the future. All those ships I talked about were—to be fair to the Howard government—a legacy. But what we have seen in the last few weeks is endangering thousands of jobs. All that extra investment, all those extra costs that were incurred to get us up to world-class standard were all thrown out the window because the minister got rolled in cabinet again. In March he said, 'I have got a plan to fix this.' He could have just done what Labor called on to happen and was planning to do after the election—that is, start the project. Nine months were wasted, the minister got rolled and jobs were lost. (Time expired)