Mr BRIGGS (Mayo) (21:20): I am not sure whether the member for Chisholm was speaking for the motion or against it given the positive outlook she had for manufacturing in Australia. I support what she said; Australia has got a very strong and diversified manufacturing sector. Some parts are performing very well at the moment while some parts are struggling under the counterweight. Pressure has been put on it by a strongly performing resource sector, and I notice the member for Wakefield, when he was walking away from his position in the Labor Party as a disciple of Paul Keating, was saying towards the end of his contribution that the success of the resource sector is apparently now a terrible thing. 'We're going to dig it all up and they're just going to leave,' was, I think, the direct quote from the member for Wakefield. The motion moved by the member for Throsby was in part a good motion. In other parts it is an appalling step back to the future for some members of the Labor Party who are trying to send a signal of false hope to people who are going through difficult times, and they should be ashamed of themselves. They have walked away from their great Hawke-Keating traditions that we hear about so often in this place—about the reformist, the open economist, the move to a competitive global environment—and moved back to providing industry plans, as the member for Bradfield put it so well in his contribution to this debate. With nearly one million people employed in it, the manufacturing sector is important to our economy. We will always have a manufacturing sector, and we should have one, but we will not have a manufacturing sector which is subsidised by government because we know that government subsidies do not work. The member for Wakefield can call it whatever he likes—he can call it co-investment. If the Labor Party is so desperate to run businesses it should go and try to run a business. Co-investment is the new way of describing it. It is sophistry at its finest from the member for Wakefield. But so hypocritical are those in the government and their friends on this side that, at a time when car manufacturers are under the greatest pressure we have seen because of the dollar and other competitiveness pressures internationally, what do the Toyota workers do under their leadership of the AMWU? They walk off the job. What a shock! We have absolute pressure, we are hearing from them day in, day out; we have a motion before the parliament saying that the industry is going to fall over if we do not intervene and have co-investment, as the member for Wakefield put it. And what do the Toyota workers do? 'We'll go off the job! We may as well. Why wouldn't we?' Come on, give me a break! This highlights an utter hypocrisy. As the member for Gilmore and the member for Indi said so well regarding this Labor Party: its members talk in this chamber from the green leather of that side, but when they are out there with their mates in the AMWU they walk everyone off the job when workers are under great pressure, and they expect the taxpayer to co-invest to keep the industry going. That is the great hypocrisy of the modern Labor Party. Paul Keating will be at home tonight with his head hung in shame that one of his disciples, sitting there, refuses to continue along the path that he knows Australia should continue on. As I said before: go forwards, not backwards; let us keep moving forward. The member for Wakefield is a good example. The modern Labor Party reminds me of Ronald Reagan's most famous contribution to American public life, where he said, describing the government: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it. That is what this motion is about. This motion is the confirmation of what Ronald Reagan said so famously in the 1980s about a Democrat government. This is exactly what you could say about a Labor government these days. At a time when it knows parts of the manufacturing sector are under genuine pressure—and we agree that they are under genuine pressure—what does it do? It goes and puts the world's biggest carbon tax on them, putting them under more pressure. The second thing they will do is have their mates at the AMWU walk off the job at Toyota in Melbourne in the middle of the greatest pressure on the vehicle industry we have seen, but they will still come cap in hand for co-investment. Finally what you will have is the great re-regulation of the labour market to make it more difficult for these manufacturing employers to compete or to ensure that they are competitive going forward. I think that today the chairman of the congressional House of Representatives Committee on the Budget in the United States, Mr Paul Ryan, put it perfectly. He said, 'Governments shouldn't try and pick winners and losers in the marketplace; they should focus on the conditions for economic growth and let the private sector create jobs.'