Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great honour to follow my colleague the member for Makin, who always speaks in a very intelligent manner and with a great deal of knowledge and street smarts. He was a great mayor of the great council of Salisbury. I was happy to be a resident of Salisbury and happy to vote for you Tony too, on occasion. You always did a great job by those in my electorate and also by those in the electorates of Port Adelaide and Makin. You have a long history of serving the northern suburbs.

It is also always interesting to follow the member for Mayo, who has departed to the party room for the CPRS debate—no doubt to participate in that cage match that they are having. It is a bit of a cage fight. It reminds me of that movie Fight Club. Do you remember Fight Club? Underground boxing by people who should know better but do not? Young men just punching on, I think is the expression. There is no doubt that a Liberal Party meeting is a lot like that at the moment. But I digress and I should be discussing the importance of manufacturing in Australia.

This industry is tremendously important to Australia. It produces billions of dollars in export revenue, it directly employs over 50,000 people and it indirectly employs thousands more. These people need our support and encouragement to keep making the great products that they make. This government knows that if you do not have car manufacturing—if your country does not have a car manufacturing industry—then generally you have very little manufacturing full stop. This is a government and a Prime Minister that want to see Australia as a country that makes things, that makes elaborately transformed manufactures. As Paul Keating used to often say: ‘We don’t just want to be a mine or a quarry or a beach for the rest of the world. We want to make things and we want to export things.’

This industry is tremendously important to South Australia. I cannot stress its importance enough. Despite all the tribulations of the previous decade—losing Mitsubishi and losing many component firms associated with car and other forms of manufacturing—manufacturing is still the heart and soul of the South Australian economy. Defence manufacturing is increasingly important and it is interesting to note that the Rann government has won some $44 billion worth of defence contracts in recent times. Manufacturing has been tremendously important to the wine industry, which has a big impact as an employer and an exporter in my electorate and the areas adjacent to it.

Of course car manufacturing is where it all began, when Sir Thomas Playford, a great Liberal premier of our state, went out to the world in his own particular fashion. It is hard to imagine a more humble man—he was a cherry farmer from the Adelaide Hills—but he marched into various boardrooms and convinced them to invest in South Australia. That is why a lot of companies like Holden and Bridgestone set up in South Australia. There are a lot of great stories about the foundation of manufacturing in South Australia. In my heartland in northern Adelaide, in the city of Playford and the city of Salisbury, one in four workers is a manufacturing worker. The income they earn is tremendously important to their families. Manufacturing jobs tend to be well paid, they tend to have good conditions and, despite what some people say, they do have good secure futures. If you doorknock places like Salisbury, Elizabeth or Gawler or even the country towns to the north, like the town I grew up in, Kapunda, you will find vehicle industry workers from Holden, Bridgestone, Futuris and the hundreds of small engineering firms that get their business from manufacturing either in the food area, in cars or in defence. Manufacturing has been important to the identity and the culture of the northern suburbs of Adelaide. Holden is still a major sponsor of the Central District footy club.

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