Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Edwards is yelling a lot in here, but he is a mouse in the party room, and he is completely mute in the South Australian media when it comes to standing up for South Australia. You are quiet now, aren't you?

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for the Abbott government to slug South Australia once might be explained away as misfortune; when it slugs South Australia a second time it looks like perhaps carelessness. But when the Abbott government slugs our state a third time, we can only conclude it is part of a deliberate campaign of anti-South Australian policies—and that is what it has done.

The first hit to South Australia was last year's decision by the Liberal Party to slash support for the automotive industry. What happened? Holden decided it would stop making cars at Elizabeth, a hammer blow to the local workforce. We had a South Australian minister, Mr Briggs, backgrounding the media against Holden, and that was followed by the spectacle of the nation's Treasurer on the floor of the parliament goading Holden to pull out of Australia. The second hit to South Australia came with the government's budget, an unprecedented assault on South Australia's hospitals and schools. Six hundred and fifty five million dollars—

Senator Edwards interjecting—