Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I follow Senator Carr's hysterical and rather incoherent rant, and share with Senator Wong, quite frankly, that this is a very sad day. As a South Australian, it is a sad day to see 1,600 jobs at the Holden car plant disappear by 2017, and to see the flow-on effects that will no doubt impact on the South Australian economy.

But I have to say we were warned about this some time ago. Seven years ago in this place I stood up and I said that if Mr Kim Carr ever became industry minister, there would be no car industry in this country. And what followed was the full Chairman Mao outburst and rhetoric and 20 minutes of abuse about how I did not know what I was talking about. But Senator Carr himself has overseen for the past six years the closure of Mitsubishi and the announcement that Ford is going, and the legacy of his mismanagement, and the Labor Party's mismanagement, of the manufacturing industry in this country is the announcement by Holden today.

The tragedy of Senator Carr is that he suffers from veritaphobia. Veritaphobia is a fear of telling the truth, and this is what we have got on that side of the chamber. He will not acknowledge that his motivation and his interest in the motor vehicle industry were driven more by his factional powerbroking and his attempt to stifle the short cons in Victoria and by his desire to boost his faction ranks by unionising the workforce, giving them whatever they wanted to amass more union muscle for him. That was his interest. He was not interested in sustaining the industry as a whole; he was more interested in sustaining his union base. That is the power—the misuse and abuse of power—that we see from the other side of the chamber.

It is worth reflecting that after six years of Labor, we have $300 billion worth of debt in this country and nothing to show for it. No motor vehicle manufacturing industry.