22 November, 2011
I rise today to speak on the Minerals Resource Rent Tax Bill 2011 and associated bills. I would like to start with some words that appear to be rather wise. They were said at a keynote address to a CEDA convention in Perth last year:
“There are two broad possible policy responses to the problems cr...
14 September, 2011
It’s a great pleasure and privilege to be here today to talk about the future of Australian manufacturing.
From the outset, let me say that I believe Australia can have a vibrant, competitive manufacturing future. And it is a visionary government that fosters a diversified and co...
23 August, 2011
It is a week to particularly focus on the crisis that is taking hold in the manufacturing sector. One would think that, at a time when there are so many cost pressures making our domestic manufacturers less competitive against our export competition and against imports, this would be the last time t...
17 August, 2011
I rise to speak on the Customs Amendment (Anti-dumping Improvements) Bill 2011. This is a day that Australian industry and the coalition has been waiting for for a long time—around three years, in fact. It was genuinely as long ago as that that the Labor Party flagged that the government would be ta...
17 August, 2011
The minister, the member for Charlton, gave us one of his least convincing performances. He has this tactic: if you want to have everyone switch off, if the potato is too hot to handle, speak in the most boring monotone voice to bore people into submission. We have a government that is not and shoul...
04 July, 2011
I rise to speak on the Auditor-General Amendment Bill 2011 and to support the amendments that were discussed earlier by the member for Mackellar. But I also want to take this opportunity to once again call on the member for Lyne in his capacity as the Chair of the Joint Committee of Public A...
15 June, 2011
We heard the Prime Minister today talk about the challenges facing the manufacturing sector. You would think that, in acknowledging ever so briefly some of these challenges, she would not embark on a carbon tax that was going to send our manufacturing offshore and export our jobs. Alan Oster, the ch...
14 June, 2011
I rise tonight to speak on behalf of the many thousands of farmers and farming families in my electorate and to echo their concerns and the experiences of many farming families right around Australia. They are hard working, small-business families who have been let down by a government that not only...
01 June, 2011
The manufacturing sector is critical to Australia. One million Australians work in this sector. It may interest the member who has just spoken to know that during the time of this Labor government 550 jobs a week are lost in manufacturing. I will repeat that so that he adds it to his little notebook...
25 May, 2011
We are halfway through National Manufacturing Week and, sadly, the woeful and weak Gillard government still cannot even summon so much as a half-hearted interest in the sector's future. Nearly 90,000 jobs have already been lost under Labor. There have been more than 20 separate monthly contractions ...