AMWU: TIME TO GET FAIR DINKUM
30-January-2012
While the Government beats its chest about car industry support, the Assistant Treasurer exposes himself as utterly clueless about the billions of dollars of assistance Labor is providing.
On the ABC’s 7:30 program last night, Bill Shorten produced this astounding piece of accounting when questioned about the level of support the car industry will receive:
“Well we've committed to what we've already said, that's the $500 million in the transformation scheme.”
Mr Shorten does not know how much money is allocated in the Automotive Transformation Scheme andwas also clearly nonplussed about the series of broken promises and cuts made by the Government.
He will presumably be stunned to learn that the level of budgetary and tariff assistance is approximately $16 billion through to 2020 – more than 30 times his guess – and that, under Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, Labor has trashed at least $1.4 billion worth of promises to the industry.
When even the Assistant Treasurer can have his numbers wrong by so many billions of dollars, it provides yet another insight into this dysfunctional embarrassment that passes itself off as a government.
The car industry needs certainty in these difficult times and not the haphazard changes and quick fixes the Government tries to pass off as policy.
Labor has consistently failed to address the problems of too much red tape, workforce inflexibility and too many barriers to investment and has failed through its ad hoc grants to tackle long term sustainability.
Adding to the woes, the carbon tax will take $460 million off car makers’ bottom lines at the worst possible time.
Before Labor can eliminate terms like “sovereign risk” from the car industry lexicon, it must first demonstrate that people in senior ranks within its party have at least a vague grasp of their own figures.