Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I walked in here and saw Senator Carr with his prepared speech and the lectern and I thought that we were finally going to hear something from Senator Carr in relation to Labor’s industry policy. About the only thing that I gleaned from his speech was that, while he was attacking the government’s commitment to manufacturing, he spent about a minute talking about a number of successful manufacturing exporters who have been exporting successfully under the auspices of this government. What an extraordinary way to attack the government—by talking about the government’s successes! In 20 minutes, did we hear one thing from the Australian Labor Party about a policy? Did we hear one word from Senator Carr about what the Labor Party’s policy will be? We did not.

I will take the chamber to a quote from Doug Cameron on 24 April 2005 regarding the China free trade agreement. This was a time when I think Senator Carr was the shadow minister. Doug Cameron said:

If you’ve got a policy, if you’ve got values, if you’ve got principles, why don’t Labor stand up for them? And this is the problem of Labor over the last 12 years. They don’t simply have any values and principles that manufacturing workers can see.

That was Doug Cameron talking about one of his own. I would have thought that there would be some factional alliance there, wouldn’t there—loosely or very tightly?