‘NOBODY’S JOB IS SAFE’ – EVEN KIM CARR’S
12-December-2011
Four tortured years of backflips, broken promises and incoherent policies finally caught up with Kim Carr today – but his sacking as cabinet Minister is clearly being used to mask Julia Gillard’s own bungling of the innovation, industry, science and research portfolio.
Mr Carr’s performance was marked by his obsession with unaccountable spending of billions of dollars, and his belligerent hostility to critics. He also presided over the worst rate of manufacturing job losses in Australia’s history, and a succession of atrocious policy and strategic blunders – among which were:
· support for a carbon tax that will destroy Australian industry;
· passionate advocacy of the always-doomed ‘Cash for Clunkers’ policy howler;
· the overnight abolition of the Green Car Innovation Fund as part of a trashing of signed, 10-year commitments with the car industry without even a single word of warning;
· the decimation of support for R&D and commercialisation in Australia;
· the resignation of a Chief Scientist who had never even met the Prime Minister.
Even the vast majority of Terry Cutler’s recommendations from Mr Carr’s much heralded innovation policy review in 2008 were discarded, ignored or diluted.
Of course, everyone knows that very few of these decisions were his own and that Mr Carr has always been the fall guy for the terrible policies and decisions of Ms Gillard.
Indeed, Labor will not be able to clear away the dog’s breakfast it has created for itself in the areas of innovation, industry and science by carving up the portfolio and shuffling the deck chairs on a sinking ship.
Instead, it must immediately break with its failed policies that have wrought havoc in industry and Australia’s innovation and science communities.
Mr Carr infamously quipped in 2008 that “nobody’s job is safe” under this dreadful Labor government – and, in the end, it was a judgement far closer to reality than even he probably imagined at the time.