Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise on this occasion of very sad news. Developments in the last few hours have revealed that Forgacs shipbuilding in my home Hunter region will be laying off another 160 workers from their 450 strong workforce. Unless something urgent is done they have signalled they intend to close by the end of this year. This will mean their workforce that has come down from 900 to 450 will now come down to 290 and, unfortunately, be zero by the end of the year. This is a great tragedy. This tragedy would have been avoidable if the Liberal government had taken action to combat the shipbuilding valley of death and if they had taken action to secure the security of this nation.

The response from the member for Paterson was appalling. The member for Paterson showed not a single skerrick of sympathy for those workers, instead he claimed that the fault lay entirely with Labor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me review the facts. Forgacs won AWD shipbuilding module contracts under Labor in 2008-09. It was a Labor government that chose to award those contracts to Forgacs that delivered 900 jobs to my region. Secondly, it was Labor in 2013 that had a plan to combat the shipbuilding valley of death through making the supply ships in Australia and looking at the future frigates. Any statement from the member for Paterson on this issue is a gross untruth and demonstrates yet again the incompetence of the man. He has been demoted twice in the last two years due to his gross incompetence and the gross incompetence by this government.

There is a great human cost to this lack of action by the Liberal government. I met a redundant worker from Forgacs in Toronto only three weeks ago. He explained how he was doing it very tough. He was waiting for Centrelink benefits and was on the verge of living out of his car because of this great tragic event in his life, an event that would have been avoidable if those on the other side had taken action. This is a tragedy not just for Forgacs workers and their families; it is occurring throughout the nation. We have seen the tragic news with BAE shipbuilding and the loss of jobs there. That shipbuilding yard is in huge doubt as well.

All this comes because of the broken promise from those opposite and their lack of action on combating the shipbuilding valley of death and their lack of action on submarines. Before the last election they made a commitment to build 12 submarines in Adelaide and they broke that promise. They broke that promise because they do not care about Australian jobs. They broke that promise because in their hearts they do not care about national security. This is the party that brought us into the second Iraq war. This is the party that brought us into Vietnam. This is the party of 'Pig Iron Bob'.

They hide behind national security rhetoric. When it comes to putting our interests first they fail. They are about to put 4,000 to 5,000 shipbuilding workers out of work. Not only will that have a grievous impact on those families and the regions in which they reside, including my home Hunter region; it will have an impact on our national sovereignty. We are maritime nation. We need to be able to build, maintain and repair ships in this country. Their policies are reducing that ability. Their policies mean that it will be enormously difficult to build the next generation of submarines, let alone maintain them. Their policies mean that it will be enormously difficult to build the next generation of frigates and maintain them appropriately.

The great tragedy is that our industry can compete against the rest of the world. By the time we were building the last few vessels of the Anzac class we were building them cheaper than you could do anywhere else in the world. That was a benefit of a continuous build and a continuous shipbuilding policy. It was the policy of the Liberal government around 2003 and it lasted six months before they abandoned it. I am calling on them to embrace it. It is the only solution to this problem. It is the only solution to a problem that is imperilling 5,000 jobs. It is the only solution to the undermining of the huge national defence capability that we would need to rely on, God forbid, if we came into any conflict.

I am calling on the Abbott government to take action, to stop sitting on their hands, as they have done for the last year and nine months, and to start to do something about it. They cannot continue to blame the Labor government that took real action on this issue. They cannot continue to play petty games of blame when our national defence is in peril and when the jobs of 5,000 workers and their families are in peril. I call on them to put the interests of the nation first instead of their political narrow interests.