Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President. I move:

At the end of the motion, add:

and further consideration of the bill be an order of the day for three sitting days after a draft of the final regulations relating to this bill, which according to the Government will set out the requirements relating to economic sustainability, environmental effectiveness and workforce training that the automotive industry is expected to meet, are laid on the table.

In other words, they are saying, ‘Parliament, hand over billions tonight to the car industry in Australia, owned offshore, and subsequent to that, in October, we will bring in draft regulations which we will circulate to the industry and try and get their agreement to those regulations’—and if they do not like them, no doubt they will water them down—’and after that we will bring in regulations here.’ They are saying, ‘Taxpayers, you give the car industry the money and, car industry, you tell us what conditions you want applied to that and we will just agree with them when we bring in the regulations.’ That is entirely the wrong process. If the government has those regulations ready in October to go out for consultation to the industry, then we should be delaying this legislation until we see those regulations ourselves so that we can see whether the government’s rhetoric about the conditions that they are going to impose in terms of economic sustainability, environmental effectiveness and workforce training actually mean anything or whether they are just to put some sort of gloss over what is effectively a transfer of wealth out of the pockets of Australian taxpayers into the pockets of, largely, three multinational corporations. That is what is going on here with this legislation.

The component manufacturers are important in this, and I understand that: we want to keep those regional jobs. But the best way to keep them is to bring in some accountability, some standards and some requirements that have to be met—not a whole lot of pussyfooting around with a few words that might describe something in the way of environmental effectiveness. And I am amused by the government’s choice of language here, because I would remind them that it was in fact originally ‘ecologically sustainable development’, the ESD process. Development was not supposed to be sustainable; it was meant to be ecologically sustainable. Now we have dumped all that, so it is economic sustainability that we want for the car industry, and environmental effectiveness and workforce training are just tacked onto that.

We are in an age of peak oil. We are in an age of climate change. The only vehicles that people are going to want to look at in the future are those that have the highest vehicle fuel efficiency, and plug-in electric cars will rapidly be the way the world goes—plug-in electric cars from renewable energy. Countries like ours that have refused to bring in feed-in tariffs, that are still a mile behind the rest on renewables, are going to suffer rather badly. We will be paying higher oil prices or other energy prices, because of the carbon costs embedded in that energy, because we did not move soon enough to where we needed to be and did not redesign our cities to make them urban villages linked by rapid mass transit with highly efficient plug-ins run from the renewable energy that we installed. We will be uncompetitive in a world in which the oil price will go to $200 a barrel. Let us see what that does to food production; let us see what that does to the way that cities are run; let us see what that does to aviation fuel, because that is what we are headed for in the not-too-distant future.

I am really disgusted by the sloppiness and the laziness shown by this rush to sandbag the multinationals in the car industry. They have not served Australian workers and communities well. They have put off workers willy-nilly as it suited them, in terms of not being competitive. Who is holding them accountable now for refusing to move with consumer sentiment? Where is the government education program encouraging the community to buy energy-efficient cars? It is not there, because the government has actually been subsidising, through its procurement policy and its fringe benefits tax, the manufacturing of vehicles which are uncompetitive and which lead to people losing their jobs. Every worker who has lost their job in recent times from the car industry or the car component manufacturing sector should be holding previous Liberal and Labor governments accountable for handing over taxpayers’ money without picking up the trends, without recognising where the world was going in terms of innovation and consumer sentiment.

Frankly, I think it is time we got real with the car industry. It is time we had a revolution in Australia about how we spend taxpayers’ money on industry development. I think it is lazy and rather tragic that we have such weak language around the basis on which we hand over billions of dollars, yet again, to this industry.