Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Albanese has a lot of familiarity with this industry, of course, because of the AMWU, the union that he is from—although not so much in New South Wales, because there is not so much of a car industry there.

We do have to put some analysis into the amount of money we are spending on this industry. Because of the large amount of debt that this government has built up, we will not be able to spend like we have in the past, when we managed the economy properly, when we managed the economy well. Let us not forget that we left this government 18 months ago with no net debt. Now we find we have $315 billion in debt, and it will reduce the amount of money that can be spent on industries such as this. It will mean higher taxes. It will mean a very difficult time ahead for the Australian economy.

This is a large amount of money. That is why we have moved these amendments: to have some better analysis of government spending on this. So it is very disappointing that Senator Carr has walked away from the negotiations we were undertaking with him on this bill. We wanted to have strong analysis of how this money was being spent to ensure it was being spent well. I think there is great concern in Australia, and certainly in the South Australian constituency of mine, that this money is not just wasted and that we are getting value for money. There certainly has been a perception in the past that the amount of money being spent on this industry has not been worthwhile or has not achieved what it was setting out to achieve. There is the analysis by the Productivity Commission that suggests that it costs $300,000 per job in this industry, which is a large amount of money. It is an extraordinary amount of money per job to be supported.

Mr Speaker, I will get us through the remaining 30 seconds before the beginning of question time, by reminding the House and everyone present that one of the reasons we need to do this is the debt that has been raised by this government, which is the highest level of debt we have ever seen, all because of the ill-thought-through, badly planned spending decisions of this government.

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