John Madigan (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to speak on this matter of public importance, the Prime Minister's failed leadership. Quite frankly, Australians are sick of this self-indulgent BS. The average unemployment rate is 6.2 per cent. In Victoria it is 6.1 per cent and in South Australia it is 7.9 per cent. These figures concern me. They concern me more than today's MPI stunt. I do not make any excuses for the current Prime Minister or former prime ministers but I would like to point out that I do not hold the other two prospective candidates in any higher regard, namely Mr Turnbull and Mr Shorten. Instead, I think we as a parliament should stop bickering about the Prime Minister's leadership and instead focus on our country and our people.

When I think about failures in government, I think of Manus Island, I think of the fact that no contracts were signed for the building of our submarines or our frigates under the previous governments, I think of the loss of the car industry and I think of the fact that governments of all persuasions have not established a sensible Australian procurement policy. When it comes to determining whether a Prime Minister has failed, I would prefer to let the ultimate judge be the Australia people at election time, not faceless men who have moved up the party-political ranks through deals and delusion.

Today, let me speak about how the office of Prime Minister has failed over successive governments, both Labor and Liberal. In my working life alone, I have seen the car manufacturing and heavy industry shrink. We had Nissan and we had Mitsubishi; we still currently have Ford, Toyota and Holden. I have seen the demise of Massey Ferguson, Vickers Ruwolt, and Jacques, the industrial engineering group. I have seen the breakup of BHP and its divisions. BHP was a conglomerate of engineering and manufacturing, oil and gas—from Rheem hot water services to Waratah farm fencing, and structural steel for our bridges and our buildings. The steel industry is currently in crisis because of materials dumped on our shores. Emerging economies across the world are trying to build and maintain a manufacturing base, while we are letting ours go to rack and ruin. Many nations look upon Australia with contempt in the knowledge that we have a car industry yet we are bidding it good-riddance.

Our governments, of all persuasions, seem to be all talk. One would think, with the amount of white and green papers coming out of this place, that government might be able to advance Australia's interests—but I guess that would just be naive. When I have CEOs and presidents of large multinational companies coming into my office and telling me that their company is reluctant to further invest in Australia because of the consistent chatter about leadership—whether it be Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott or Malcom Turnbull—I wonder what the hell is going on. Sometimes I think Australian industry might be better off if parliament did not sit and politicians just kept their mouths shut. As I said in my maiden speech:

If we are not making decisions that make the lives of Australians better, then we should at least make sure we do not make them any worse.

Currently we have a tsunami of job losses approaching us from the demise of the automotive and component manufacturing sectors. We are on the verge of delivering hopelessness, despair and a lack of self-esteem, self-worth and self-respect to tens of thousands of Australians. People are asking us to stop bickering and get on with the job of managing the country for the benefit of all Australians. Our economy is currently hostage to commodity prices, peaks and troughs, and we seem to be a country that is unwilling to add value and to strive to provide meaningful employment for all Australians.

Only this afternoon I was speaking to a chap who, during his 40-year working life, started a company in the 1990s. The company exported to the world and they currently still do. He said:

We, as a nation, no longer have the ability to do non-ferrous metal extrusion in this country.

For those of you who do not know, non-ferrous materials include metals like copper and alloys like brass. We cannot do that very basic thing on our own shores.