Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

To the shadow Treasurer I would say: do not verbal me. If he wants to quote one of my speeches then bring it in and quote it in full, because the idea that I have ever exhibited anything other than concern for Australians who have lost their jobs is completely untrue and I am not having the shadow Treasurer come in, as part of the campaign of fear and misrepresentation by the opposition, and pretend that is true. The people who have used workers and their jobs as political playthings in this parliament sit on the opposition front benches. They are very, very happy to walk into a steel-manufacturing business to stand alongside a steelworker while the cameras are rolling and then, as soon as the cameras have gone, they come into this place and they vote against the future of that industry by voting against the Steel Transformation Plan. They are very, very happy to go and stand in a car-manufacturing plant and look at the cars being made with the very highly skilled workers who make them, but when it comes to being counted in supporting the car industry they stand for a half a billion dollar cutback now and the end of assistance in 2015. They want every worker in the car industry to be out of a job. Of course, we know too that, whilst they pretend to be the friend of small businesses and to care about the people who work in small businesses, in this parliament they voted against tax breaks for small businesses and an instant asset write-off which would have put them into a better position and enabled them to employ people and to continue to generate jobs. They did that because they would prefer to give more money to some of the most profitable mining companies in the world.

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