Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

Sure. The minister did his press conference, the first one, on 21 May, but you won't see much else.

He'll do his set plays here. He won't even be here for an MPI. He's collecting the pay and not doing the job. Do you know what will get me, and what will be really offensive? He's not around doing his job as industry minister, he's not doing his press conferences, he's not visiting out in the industry and he's not championing new jobs; he's doing his legal defence, I'll be interested to see. He could win or he could lose the defamation case. We'll see. But you know what will be really offensive? If this guy wins his defamation case and then pockets the money. After not doing the job as an industry minister, he pockets the money. And maybe then he will pocket the money for defamation wins. He may or may not get those. But it's just wrong. His heart isn't in it. He's not doing the job. He's not there defending people. He's there merely because they had to find a convenient place to put an embattled minister. It is not right at all—taking the money for the day job and not being there for people when they need them most. It is utterly offensive.

The other thing is, too, he challenges us about, for example, creating a start-up year, and says, 'Well, we've done it in the past.' The problem is that the problems that have been present under the coalition in times past have re-emerged today. Isn't it surprising: here we are, a Labor party, championing entrepreneurism and being bagged out by the Liberal Party! This is how far they've fallen. They're now big believers in debt and deficit, and they no longer believe in entrepreneurialism. They go out and they bag entrepreneurism. It is wrong. We don't need a part-time industry minister whose biggest goal for the job is to get out of the job.

What we need is someone who truly believes in manufacturing, someone who will truly champion the re-creation of those jobs. New firms, new jobs, new growth—that's what we need. We don't need a minister who has checked out and is not prepared to champion manufacturing jobs in this country. From our point of view, the only time he'll be around a manufacturing worker is to use them as a prop. They're not props. They're people who we should be supporting, and we should be ensuring that they have good jobs.

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