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

of borrowed money and we have no motor vehicle manufacturing industry to show for it. You might be proud of that legacy, but I certainly am not. Shame on you. You remained silent and forgotten through the entire years of the Labor government, and now you stand up here giving us pious rhetoric.

This is an opposition that is absolutely flawed, and it is so embarrassed by its own track record it is trying to blame others for its mismanagement. I have to say that I thought Senator Carr, with his fear of the truth, his veritaphobia, actually let something slip; he blurted out something during his question today. In one of the questions he asked he said the exit of Holden was 'tragic and unavoidable'. A true word is often spoken by a slip of the tongue, because Senator Carr presided over and saw all the inside nitty-gritty about the industry when he was industry minister and he put it in the too-hard basket. He said: 'No, I don't want to deal with this. I've borrowed $300 million on behalf of the Australian people, but I don't want to save their manufacturing industry.'

I am sick of the hypocrisy on the other side. We inherited a basket case of a budget. There is no doubt about that. We were elected to fix up the mess that Labor created; the legacy of Labor's six years, their torrent of abuse of office, is going to be with us for some time yet. Holden, unfortunately, is a casualty of that. There are 1,600 jobs going in my state of South Australia, and the flow-on effects are going to be felt for years and years to come. But the blame, fairly and squarely, lies with poor government management by the Labor Party over the last six years.

Senator Carr would have the people of Australia believe that somehow General Motors in Detroit last night just said: 'Let's shut down our South Australian and Victorian manufacturing facilities. Let's do that at a cost of some $600 million.' Unfortunately, we know the Labor Party is cavalier about $600 million, $1 billion and $100 billion, but General Motors are not. They would have been looking at and examining for many years the consequences and the potential costs. We know there are unavoidable issues attached to manufacturing in this country—the high dollar, the tyranny of distance, the relatively small market and so on—but Senator Carr and his cohorts in the Labor Party need to come clean and start telling the truth. (Time expired)