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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-04-10 Daily Xml
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GM HOLDEN

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:32): My question is for the Premier. When the Premier exchanged correspondence in which he tells us that Holden agreed to a minimum jobs guarantee as part of the $50 million agreement, was he aware that the federal Labor government's $215 million agreement had no minimum job guarantees?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:33): I can't recall at the time whether I knew that or not, but it wouldn't have made any difference to me, because I was going to insist on it in our agreement. In fact, what I was concerned to do was to be in Detroit, because I wasn't content to let the negotiations be handled by the federal government on my behalf. That's why I went there, and there are some things in our agreement that would not be in our agreement if we had simply outsourced our negotiations to the federal government.

I fully respect the federal government's imperatives—they see their arrangement as simply being about securing the billion-dollar investment in new plant. That has never been the extent to which we have seen the nature of our obligations. As we are proceeding along this trajectory of having an advanced manufacturing sector, we know it is absolutely crucial to sustain an existing manufacturing base but then take steps to transition ourselves into that future.

We were open with people through the whole of this process that this was going to be a transformative process. We knew that there was going to be a smaller component of ultimately the new borrowing between 2016 and 2022 that would have local components, so that meant that we had to find a way of transitioning our component suppliers into a global supply chain, getting them up to standard so they could be there and also transitioning some of those component suppliers into other manufacturing sectors, because they may not be able to make that journey.

That has always been the reason behind why we put some very significant obligations in the agreement, including production levels, including employment levels, and that is why we insisted upon that. The commonwealth has its own imperatives and requirements, but these are the South Australian imperatives and requirements.

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