Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

My home state of South Australia is facing a jobs crisis. It is now making national headlines for all the wrong reasons—posting the worst unemployment rate in the nation for the last two months. This week the bad news has kept coming, with BHP Billiton announcing it was cutting 380 jobs from Olympic Dam in the far north of the my home state and from in Adelaide. The unemployment statistics would be bad enough but the planned closure of auto making and ship manufacturing in the next two years means SA faces a true jobs emergency. That is why it is bizarre that the government continues to sit on the $700 million left in the Automotive Transformation Scheme, which could be used to transition the auto-making sector, the component sector, into other sectors. The government should direct those funds to transitioning the 150 auto components firms and the 33,000 workers directly employed into sectors that have a future in this country. The multiplier effect we know is that in excess of 100,000 to 150,000 will be affected by that. We need to ensure that we assist Ford, Holden and Toyota to stay here until the last possible moment.

Last week's announcement by the government that it intends to set up a continuous build of surface warships was welcome as far as it went, but it was light on detail and any cutting of steel in Adelaide is still more than two elections away in 2020.

The 'valley of death' has arrived in South Australia, in Victoria and in New South Wales. ASC has shed hundreds of jobs in recent months and this will only get worse when the AWD work ends mid next year. The government could avoid much of the valley of death by redirecting a local build of the Navy's two new supply ships, rather than sending the $2 billion contract overseas in a limited tender. Now is the time to announce a local build of the new support ships, or at least a hybrid build, to be built in Australia's three naval ship yards, in Newcastle, in Port Melbourne and in Adelaide. It is well past time for the government to deliver on its commitment to build subs in Australia.