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

I have spoken on the demise of automotive manufacturing in this country many times in this House because it is of obvious importance to my electorate, to the state of South Australia and to the national economy. It is worthwhile recounting some of the history of what has occurred here. There was a very good article on 30 November 2013 by Joshua Dowling in The Advertiser. He recounted that over the period 2001 to 2012, although Holden received $1.8 billion in federal funding, in effect, it returned $1.4 billion of that through pay as you go income tax of its workers. That is just the income tax of the workers at that plant, not counting the other economic effects that are generated: $21 billion to businesses with other goods and services. Of course it talked about the exports that came out of that factory—out of just Holden alone: its biggest export year was 2008 when 56, 000 cars were shipped mostly to the US when the dollar was 84c. I say this, because the dollar's rise to over parity was one of the key economic reasons why Holden announced its closure. That was the pressing economic effect and that is why they needed additional government assistance at the time. Any government would have looked at the currency and said that clearly it was an issue for manufacturing. It is worthwhile noting that today it is 76c Australian to the US dollar and, but for the actions of this government, we would have been exporting cars to the US, in particular, the US patrol car and US police car market.

What happened after that? The company asked the government for help. Given the currency, given the trading conditions, and what did they get? Well, they got an ultimatum: 'Hockey dares GM to leave.' We know that that was their attitude, that they had set up a contest of who could be harder within the cabinet room: the Prime Minister at that time and the Treasurer, beating their chests about who could be harder on the car industry.

What devastating consequences have occurred for my state, for my electorate and for the national economy, because we are now looking at the effects of 50,000 direct job losses, thousands more beyond that and supply chains being completely disrupted and destroyed. What we find is that the government has put in place a so-called growth fund of $155 million in total that has all been spent. So now we find that we are looking at the closure date of October 20 for Holden—slightly earlier, I think, for Toyota—a devastating day for Australian manufacturing as this government de-industrialises the nation. We are going to see terrible and horrible effects in the local economy and tremendous disruption to the South Australian and Victorian economies and, beyond that, to the car part suppliers in New South Wales and even as far away as Queensland and Tasmania in some instances.

An enormous disruption to the national economy that was entirely preventable—this was the consequence of the Abbott-Turnbull policies put in place by, firstly, one Prime Minister and now another. We will hear later from other coalition speakers, Mr Kelly and Mr Christensen, and they will talk about subsidies and all the rest of it; however, I would point out to the House that Mr Kelly once proposed subsidising power for swimming centres. Mr Christensen wanted to see a new a wave of economic protectionism with the return of tariff and industry subsidies and has been an outspoken advocate, apparently, of ethanol. I would point out to those members that it is hard to have an ethanol industry, if you do not have an automotive industry in the country. We are now looking down the barrel of tremendous economic hardship and dislocation in South Australia and Victoria, and it has all been because you can sheet every single job loss home to this government—to this government's economic policy and to their incoherence in jobs.

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