Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

The previous speaker mentioned Boral as an example of how good and how fantastic the carbon tax is, and not two months ago Boral announced that 790 of its workers would be made redundant. This is just one in a very long roll call. I want to speak about this government's record on jobs. I want to go through the roll call of major companies that have shed their workers. These are Australian icons. They are well-known major manufacturing firms. Let us just run through the list: CSR, Rosella Foods, Amcor, Penrice Soda, Boral, BlueScope Steel, Holden, Ford, Pacific Brands, Goodman Fielder, Holden again, Toyota, CSR, BlueScope Steel again, OneSteel, SPC Ardmona, Golden Circle, Ford again. Bosch, Bradken, Boral for the second time, National Foods, Austal Shipbuilder, Cadbury, Bridgestone, Caterpillar, Rio Tinto, Pacific Brands with a massive 1,850 jobs, Ford for a third time, Holden for a third time, and one very close to my heart—the closure of Mitsubishi.

This is the record of the government over the last five years on jobs. This is their record. Paul Keating once famously said of a trade union leader that he had the jobs of 100,000 workers around his neck. This government has the jobs of thousands of these workers around its neck. These are people who had a breadwinner one day and then they came home to their family having lost their job the next day. These are private sector jobs. The government is responsible for the economy. What we have seen is a terrible indictment of this government—a roll call of Australian icon business after Australian icon business and the loss of thousands of jobs.

I want to now turn to the carbon tax and—

Mr Perrett interjecting—

They are Australian workers, you dope. They are Australian workers and they are Australian jobs.

See this speech in context