David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy President, as you are fully aware, I am a car guy. I love cars and I love car culture. I am a member of a number of car clubs. I participate in all sorts of car activities. I love cars of all sorts, especially performance cars, and I love the fact that Australia makes cars and has since the early days of the auto industry. I love the iconic cars that we have made, like the GTHO phase III Falcon from the early seventies, the L34 and A9X Toranas, the R-T series Chargers, and more recently the HSV and the Ford Performance Vehicles offerings. They are all great cars; I love them. But I do not think that taxpayers should be the owners of car companies or build cars. This is best done by private companies who are responding to market forces and demands. But, in saying that, I note that private companies need to have a level playing field. They need to be able to compete in ways that are reasonable and, as I say, on a level playing field. In that regard, I found the article by Grace Collier in The Australian today very interesting reading and I would encourage everybody to have a look at it.

But that is not to say that there is not a role for government to play in assisting car companies through transition. Historically, bipartisan support has existed for transition assistance for the car companies, but transition assistance does not mean funding them forever. Questions about the future and viability of the Australian auto industry as it remains are rightly being asked at the moment and are rightly being sent for consideration by the Productivity Commission. It is clear that Ford is leaving already, GMH is currently under threat and Toyota potentially would have challenges down the track as well. It is right to ask the question now and to ask the Productivity Commission to have a look at what factors are influencing the viability of our auto industry.

What are the things that government can realistically and properly do to assist with that viability? And what are the other challenges facing it that the government can impact on? Government, indeed Australians, need to know the answers to these questions. It is not something that we should just do in an ad hoc, knee-jerk reaction and hand out money whenever it is asked for. We need to understand what the challenge is, what the problems are in the longer term to make sure that we set the auto industry on the correct path if that is indeed possible, which I readily hope it is.

Any decisions the government make following the Productivity Commission's findings also have to be made in the context of the debt position that the previous government has left us. We need to be responsible in how we approach dealing with that debt challenge. Unfortunately for industries right across the country, that means that there is less money to throw around propping them up. That said, I mentioned that I am very interested in hearing what the findings of the Productivity Commission will be because that may well provide us with a pathway to help ensure the viability of the auto industry in Australia. I would love to see that happen but, I do repeat, we have to do that responsibly and we have to do it in the context of the great fiscal challenge that we have been left by the previous government—$250 billion worth of net debt.