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

As the member for Grey says, the people in Marrabel are, indeed, very smart—but not for the reason that he thinks. There is Councillor Adrian Shackley and all of Young Labor, particularly Ben Rillo and Sean Hill who are always great organisers for Young Labor across the state. There is Kamal Dahal from the Bhutanese community; Sheila Rammell; Councillor Gay Smallwood-Smith, who is a really great supporter of mine; Councillor Marcus Strudwick, who has always handed out for Labor in Malalar, and continues to do so; Ron and Sue Wurst, who are strong supporters in the Clare Valley; Susan Cunningham, a former employee of mine and a great contributor to the Labor movement, and I cannot thank her enough; and Lindsay Palmer, a former member of the South Australian state parliament and another big contributor in the Clare Valley.

Amongst the Wakefield federal electoral council, I have to thank: Glen Armstrong, a long-term former president of the branch and former vice-president of the Centrals footy club, is always the best companion to have by your side at a shopping centre stall or a community meeting, and is a steadying voice in those debates; Stephen Hollingworth, who is a cleaner at the Munaparra shops and who I see every morning when I go to my electoral office, and also a former head delegate at the Holden site—he is amazingly connected to that part of working-class Australia, the factory workers and the people who really did want to continue to make things in this country but for the actions of the Abbott government; Derralyn Dellar; Brad Templar; 'Cricket' and Phil Fox; and Paul Purvis. These people were all big contributors to my branch and its organisation through the term and also during the election campaign.

I have to thank Zak Gadalla, Ollie Bullitis, Ali Muhammad from the Hazara community, David Amol from the Sudanese community, and the state members of parliament—Tony Picollo in Gawler, Jon Gee in Napier, Zoe Bettison in Salisbury, Lisa Vlahos in Taylor, and Lee Odenwalder, who is a former employee of mine and a former police officer in the local area of Little Para, and is a great contributor to state parliament and the local community.

All of these people made a big contributions to my re-election and I do not know where I would be without them. As you go on in this job, you realise how much you rely on the local community and your supporters within it. I also have to thank all the local papers for their contributions, and I have always found the local media, without fail, to be fair and reasonable and to reflect community opinion. All of them are country newspapers. I have a fair smattering of really successful country newspapers that are, in some in some instances, expanding. It is nice to see newspapers—which were all told are going the way of the dodo—expanding their readership and their base and finding a market out there. I have to thank the Plains Producer, the Two Wells & Districts Echo, the Barossa and Light Herald, the Northern Argus, the Barossa Leader,The Bunyip and the Northern Messenger. We rely on those papers to have the news and the local footy. I rely on them to get the local message out about the community.

For this term there are many priorities, but the priority that will remain steadfast in South Australia is jobs. We have a big challenge. In the member for Grey's electorate there are the workers at the steelmaker Arrium. We know that they rely on a government that is active and interested in their welfare and that is committed to keeping steel manufacturing happening in Whyalla. I certainly appreciate that there has been an outbreak of bipartisanship in recent times, and I think that is an important and good thing for Whyalla.

Tragically, in my electorate we will see the closure of Holden in 2017, in this term. Many of the Holden workers do not want any media interest at this point in time. They want to look for more work through the transition centre, which I visited last week with Doug Cameron and Kate Ellis to look at the work being done by the Holden transition team to help those factory workers seek other work and sometimes be released with a modified redundancy package to take those jobs. But we are going to see a great bulk of workers who want to see the last car come off the line—an important car because it will reflect the end of car manufacturing in this country. It will be an emotional moment for this country, and I think it will be a moment of reflection for people in South Australia and people in the country, particularly when they realise the dollar is at 70c and we could have been exporting these cars, particularly to the United States. Cop cars and Chevy SSs could have been happening if different decisions had been made.

I think there will be both nostalgia and disappointment—not so much anger any more, but disappointment—with the actions of this government. We have seen the same thing at ASC, in shipbuilding. In one way or another, whether it is the supply ships, whether it is the government decision making around submarines, they got there in the end, but the decision-making process caused unnecessary angst and debate in South Australia. We now have a job to retain a skilled workforce in shipbuilding and automotive and make sure that those people go back into productive enterprises. That is going to be the great challenge for this government, and if they fail it will be a challenge for the next government, a Labor government.

It is a challenge that I want to be at the forefront of. For that reason I am very thankful that Bill Shorten has made me shadow parliamentary secretary for manufacturing and science. I want to see a country where people do make things, where manufacturing is highly engineered, where the value is driven by science, research and productivity. We can do that. We did it in the car industry, despite all the palaver that you might read in some of the news outlets. We did it in shipbuilding as well. We are capable of making very well crafted and effective bits of machinery in this country. You only have to go down and look at the latest Holdens. You only have to look at the performance of the Collins class submarines to know that Australian workers can make great and magnificent bits of kit—cars, medical instruments and a whole range of things. That is what I will dedicate myself to do, to face the jobs challenge in my state and across the country. Hopefully we will be doing it in government in short order.

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