Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's laughable for the coalition to come into the Senate this week and talk to us about the car industry. These are the very same people, the very same party, the very same coalition who had no regard for our world-class car industry. We heard the good senator from Queensland talk about a war on the family car, but it was those opposite that shut down this industry—an industry that my dad was very proud to work in—and the thousands of people who worked in the industry lost their jobs overnight.

Let's not forget that one of the decisions that former prime minister Tony Abbott's government made was to shaft Holden, when they awarded a brand new contract to BMW to replace the Holden Caprices that had been used to drive every single politician around the country. They went with a foreign owned car company. They chose a BMW over the fantastic, world-class Holden Caprices that we exported to the United States, which was a very lucrative market. They've all gone quiet over there, haven't they—Senator Lambie and others here—because it was an exclusive contract. You shut down a fantastic industry that supported thousands of people directly and indirectly, including the research and development that also was behind the car industry. Guess what? They just wanted to rationalise their spending. They didn't believe in a domestic market we as a country could build a current through.

We are the only country in the OECD that does not make cars. But overnight, one after the other, Holden, Ford and Toyota all went. I still remember that, when I was a kid, those cars cost around the $20,000 to $30,000 mark. It was very affordable for many people—families like mine—to have a car that was made here in Australia. Sadly, now we're in a marketplace where rely exclusively on foreign car companies to export their cars into Australia. What this government has decided to do is open up that market, acknowledging that we don't make cars here anymore. But the best thing for us consumers, for the very people here in the gallery watching, is to open up that market so any car that people want to get they should be able to get. That includes EVs.

What we have seen is that there is now more choice of brand new cars coming into the market. But we've had to apply pressure on the car companies, because we've also had to change the standards for fuel sold in this country. No longer should we, as a leading developed nation in the world, be able to have fuel of a very poor quality and standard. On drive.com and in articles in the Herald Sun and the Age in my home state in Victoria, we now see every week new cars being discussed about being imported here into Australia. They are certainly cheaper, because we're now opening that marketplace. We are now allowing and incentivising those car companies to sell these cars—and they're not all electric, by the way. They are hybrids. I think hybrids are doing a fantastic job at being that medium between electric and petrol, and I think you get the best of both words. I proudly drive a hybrid car, because I acknowledge the world is now moving on.

I want to call out the hypocrisy from the other side when they come in here and talk about us getting rid of the utes or the family car. They started this. In fact, if it weren't for their ideological policies back then, we'd have a fantastic, proud marketplace, where we would still continue to make Ford, Holden and Toyota cars in this country and export those cars overseas. It wasn't just the United States, too, Senator Brockman. I remember Toyota used to actually export the engines of the cars we were making here, the Avalons, back to Japan, and they were just amazed by the fantastic V6s. And I know my office might be laughing, but I had one—a gold-coloured Aurion V6, which had much more power than Ford and Holden. It put to shame those Commodore and Falcon drivers at the red lights. I could have told you that—not that I did anything else. It had more power and more torque than those cars, and it was something we were very proud of as Australians, and we should be, but, sadly, we are not.