Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

In Senator Carr's contribution, he made the important point that those who think there may be no difference between the conservatives and Labor on matters of procurement, trade and industry policy need only look at this important issue to see how stark the difference can be. I invite people to compare Senator Macdonald's contribution to that of Senator Carr, as that actually demonstrates how far apart the different parties are on these issues. If people ignore Senator Macdonald's repackaging and opinion of what Senator Carr said and merely look at the facts about where parties stand on these matters, they will see that the Labor Party and the conservatives bring very different approaches to these matters.

I think people are getting more and more concerned about where jobs and the quality of jobs in this country are going. They are getting more and more concerned that governments seem to be abandoning industry intervention and policies that support jobs and good quality jobs in this country.

I think Senator Rhiannon made an important point when she said that a lot of these issues were canvassed with working people and their families through the election campaign. I had a number of firsthand experiences of this. To my surprise, my elderly parents, when I was assisting them with their postal votes, asked me how they could vote for 'that nice Mr Xenophon'. I was a little bit disappointed! I explained that I knew 'that nice Mr Xenophon' and that, if they had actually met him themselves, they might not want to vote for him! Luckily, they were unable to vote for him because they live in Victoria. I pressed them on why they wanted to vote for 'that nice Mr Xenophon', and it was 'because he stands up for Australian jobs'. The Labor Party stands up for Australian jobs, but I think it is pretty obvious that our message is being lost. Senator Rhiannon made the important point that it gets lost because it also gets mixed in with free trade and trade agreements.

The one thing that Senator Macdonald was right about is that we do need trade. We are a trading nation. I am certainly not antitrade, but I think governments need to do more to ensure that the jobs and the quality of the jobs of Australians are protected. It is no good having lots of jobs if they are not skilled jobs and they all pay very low wages. It is not good to see a manufacturing base decimated by free trade agreements or industry policy put in by governments which leave people out of work and businesses without capacity to tender for works into the future. When factories go, they are gone and can no longer participate in the economy of this country.

People are getting more and more concerned, particularly people who have seen their children have a better standard of living, a better quality of life and better jobs than they did; they are now worried that their grandchildren will have lesser quality jobs and a lesser standard of living than their own children had. I think people see that in the move to casualisation, in the move to part-time work and in the move to contracting out work. They even see it in the teaching profession, where teachers are being employed by the public sector from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year. So they miss out on holidays, they miss out on permanency and they then have to re-apply for jobs. That is happening across the board, and people are becoming more and more concerned about that.

During the election campaign I talked to a lot of traditional Labor voters I assumed would be voting for us again and, to my astonishment, I found that some were not. Some were voting for One Nation, and I asked them why. It was not because of some of the immigration policies or other matters like that. Again, it was because they saw people standing up for jobs, talking about protections and talking about Australian values. Though One Nation does not have any of the answers to any of those problems, this identified for me that we have not talked about these issues enough and we have not explained our policies well enough. We need to be very clear about that with the Australian population.

It is important that we protect high-skilled, high-paid, good-quality jobs, and one of the ways we can do that is through government procurement. As Senator Carr pointed out, that is not to say that that should just be automatic and there should be no competition and no efficiencies in that. But it does not have to be just the lowest cost; in fact, the lowest cost is often not best value. I think that is a concept that we really need to grapple with. Senator Macdonald made the point several times that it is just about cost—that cost is king and the market will deliver to us if we allow the lowest cost to prevail. But the best value is not always the lowest cost. I want to give a couple of examples of that. I want to give an example that actually happened on our watch when we were in government. It was not a government decision; it was a Defence decision for soldiers to have Chinese-made dress boots. I refer to a report on ABC News in May 2012. It says:

The Australian Defence Force has admitted that the rubber soles are falling off the Chinese-made dress boots that soldiers are expected to wear for official parades.