Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's not often you get to talk about things that you're passionate about and have a lifelong dedication to. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a petrolhead through and through. I want to point out the irony of the member for Forde forgetting Allan Moffat OBE! That's okay, it's a bit of a dig.

Motor racing starts at go-karts and runs all the way through to Formula 1, and I've had the pleasure of being involved with all these sports right across the nation. I had the fun of standing in the starter's box at a Formula 1 race with CAMS, the Confederation of Australian Motorsports. I was able, even in my younger days—and I urge members not to look at this tape—to be at the 1988 Thunderdome where there was a skinny little bloke with curly blonde hair towing the cars off the track as they crashed. I still have Dick Johnson's headlight cover—it's something that was a treasured possession of mine. I am a red team person in politics, but when it comes to cars it's blue team all the way! When you're born in Broadmeadows, you don't have a choice; cars are in your blood.

When we talk about motorsport, it's great that we come together and talk about this and support it. I want to talk about the serious side of things, such as the jobs and the industry it creates. I remember a friend of mine owned South Side Cylinder Heads in South Melbourne. One of the Formula 1 teams came in needing a particular bracket to be made. He made that bracket quickly and swiftly, picking up that work that led to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of work. Because in Australia we have the ability to manufacture high-quality products in small numbers very quickly. These are the sorts of jobs that people like me—who didn't want to stay at school and become a lawyer—enjoy. We enjoy being able to put together an engine or a gearbox and learning these things. That's why it's important we're talking about free TAFE, getting the motorsport courses to help you develop vehicle engineering.

As the member for Wide Bay said, we all jump in our cars each and every day. Motorsport delivered ABS brakes, proper fuel injection, paddle-shift steering and all these things that we take for granted. That all comes from the technology that's put into motorsports. One aspect of motorsports is not talked about enough—and we're talking about an $8.6 billion a year industry—is drag racing. I want to be very clear. Drag racing is not illegal street racing. They are two totally different things. If you go to a drag racing strip—and I have been to the Willowbank Raceway, and all across Australia except for Perth in my time working on drag racing cars, where we won three Australian championships in the super gas field working for Steve Crook—you know the difference between a professional organisation of people where people come, where drivers get dressed in their fire suits and where safety is the no. 1 thing. You couldn't even get one drop of oil on the track or you were off, because that can lead to catastrophic situations. We've seen that just recently at Willowbank where Sam Fenech lost his life in a terrible accident. Many of my friends knew him personally and are really shattered by it. It was an absolutely terrible accident, and it's something that happens occasionally. Don Watson in 1993 was a bit of a mate, a customer of mine, and the disk brake shattered on his car at Bathurst, and he perished. It was a frightening thing to wake up the next day, look at the Herald Sun and see a picture of Don's car upside down and the carnage that it caused. These things do happen, but for every one of those there is an opportunity where we develop more technology to make it safer, including things like neck braces, which are now mandatory. If you hit a wall at 200 miles an hour you stop pretty quickly and pretty sharply.

I know many businesses have left Victoria and gone to Queensland because of the ability to race at places like Ipswich, because Victoria is the only state that doesn't have a publicly owned and sanctioned international standard drag racing facility. I think that's a bit of a shame that that has happened. To be fair, I think the drag racing fraternity has got to get together and work together to get this happening. When we were racing back in the heyday of the 1990s we had 40,000 or 50,000 people attend a one-day event, and we did that many times. The jobs of the fire crews, the marshals, the volunteers, the ticket sales—all these thing that happen—are why it's important that we keep supporting and promoting motorsport. We get the jobs out of it through TAFE. We get the careers and we get the high-flyers—we have international stars that go around the world doing their best. But, importantly, when we look back it starts with go-karts. If you look at most Formula 1 drivers and the like, and those who have gotten to the V8 supercar pinnacles, they all started their lives with go-karts. It's important we keep supporting motorsport, and I'm glad we're doing it.

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