Mr KELVIN THOMSON (8:20 PM) —I enjoyed listening to the honourable member for Lilley (Mrs Elizabeth Grace) speaking in a convincing fashion about the plight of mature aged unemployed people, particularly people over 40. Indeed, she made reference to people over 55. It would be a little more convincing if she were also on record in relation to decision of the Treasurer (Mr Costello) to include superannuation as part of the assets test for those aged over 55. The effect of that decision is to give anyone who turns 55 and happens to be without work some nine months in which to find a job. If they are unable to find a job during that period, they become effectively retired for life because superannuation is included as part of the assets test. They are not eligible for any social security support and therefore they have to dip into their superannuation in order to live. In order to do that, they have to retire. That is a most unfortunate piece of government policy, dating back to 1996. I hope that the member for Lilley and others do everything they can to address it.

Just before the House rose last year, back on 5 December in the appropriations debate, I held up a car tidy bag in the House which had been produced by a company which rejoiced in the name of No Worries Pty Ltd and described the product as the `Aussie Care' car tidy bag. It had an `Australian Made' logo on it with the familiar green triangle and the yellow kangaroo silhouetted against it. In case we still had not got the message, it even had the `Keep Australia beautiful' logo on it.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you would have been excused for thinking that this `Aussie Care' car tidy bag from the No Worries company with the `Australian Made' and `Keep Australia beautiful' logos was in fact manufactured in Australia, but you would have been wrong. If you opened up the car tidy bag and looked inside it, it turned out that it was made in India.

That was just one of the unsatisfactory consequences of the Howard Liberal government's decision in August 1996 to withdraw $2 million in funding from the Advance Australia Foundation, which caused that foundation to go into liquidation. At the time I raised this issue back in December, quite appropriately there was some media interest in it. A spokesman for the consumer affairs minister, by way of response to these concerns, said:

. . . the Government withdrew funding from AAF because an independent audit had shown it was a loss-making exercise.

The Government strongly supported the Australian Made campaign, but the AAF had proved it was not the appropriate forum.

The bad news for the minister is that this defence was nonsense. It so incensed Mr James Malone, the former Chief Executive of the Advance Australia Foundation, that he wrote to the minister to set him straight. It is worth quoting from that letter where Mr Malone says:

Briefly the facts are:

. April 1996: I briefed the then Minister for Administrative Services, David Jull, on the AAF's plans to rejuvenate the Australian Made campaign including moving it to a self funding basis over a four year period. The Minister said that the government was unlikely to remove funding from the Australian Made campaign.

. May: The Minister advised that, as an outcome of the government's general cut back in expenditure, contrary to his earlier opinion withdrawal of funding was now likely.

. June: I again visited the Minister and reported that after careful study the Foundation had confirmed it could continue the campaign on a self funding basis provided government support was available during the transitional period on a phasing out basis.

. July 3: My chairman and I met with the Minister and advised that if government was unable to provide a firm undertaking of funding, the board of the AAF was certain to place it in voluntary liquidation.

`Certain'. The letter continues:

The Minister said he could not provide the undertaking and reiterated that funding was highly unlikely.

. July 5: In view of this situation and an independent report which had advised that if the government withdrew funding, the viability of the Foundation was dubious, the board of the Foundation formally decided that the Foundation was unable to maintain its operations on a viable basis. It therefore placed the Foundation in voluntary liquidation and informed the Minister of that action. That outcome was announced in a joint press statement by my chairman and the Minister who congratulated the Foundation on its work with the campaign.

The charge that the Advance Australia Foundation was not the appropriate forum for the Australian Made campaign was entirely without foundation. This body had run the campaign successfully over a period of 12 years. It created between 900 and 2,000 jobs each year, and contributed some $360 million to gross domestic product.

Mr Malone's letter referred the minister also to an economic evaluation carried out in September 1995—presumably held amongst the records of the former Department of Administrative Services—which confirms the effectiveness of the campaign under the Advance Australia Foundation's management. Mr Malone's letter concludes:

. . . I ask that you ensure no further statements of the kind quoted above are repeated by your staff.

It is not particularly surprising that Mr Malone had to write to the minister to set him straight. By my recollection, this is the fourth minister in the Howard government to handle this portfolio area in less than two years—following ministers Geoff Prosser, David Jull and Senator Ellison who, for various reasons, fell by the wayside. Indeed, I am told by press representatives who have been pursuing this area of sorry inaction by the government that things had `gone a bit slowly' because of the frequent change of minister. In all seriousness, this was advanced as the reason.

But there is another aspect of Mr Malone's letter which is quite disturbing. If you look at the timing of this, you can see that on 3 July the government knew that the Advance Australia Foundation would close; there was a formal announcement by Minister Jull and the foundation's chairman on 10 July; and yet it still continued to collect cheques. For example, from the plastics company Kevron, it collected a cheque sent off on 17 July. Kevron has gone back and sought a refund of this cheque which did not relate to the previous year's liability but related to the forthcoming financial year, and for which they have received no service whatsoever—no promotion of the logo, no true blue campaign, no policing of the logo.

So we have a situation here where the government was told that the Advance Australia Foundation would go into liquidation, yet it allowed licensees to continue paying. That is an act of considerable deception. It confirms again just what a mess the Buy Australian campaign has become following the election of the Howard government. More than 18 months has passed since the Advance Australia Foundation went into liquidation. There is no sign of the replacement Buy Australian campaign promised by the government. There has been no promotion, no effective policing of the logo. Small businesses around Australia and in the north-west of Melbourne are sick and tired of empty rhetoric surrounding the issue of the Australian Made logo and the promised replacement—a promise made many months ago, still yet to be fulfilled.

We have a government which sees itself as self-titled champions of small business, but which is doing nothing to assist small business. I know, for example, that Mr Chambers from Kevron Plastics is quoted in the Small Business Digest of February 1998 as saying:

I showed the Minister for Small Business the Hon. Peter Reith a sample of the `offending product'—

that is, the made in India Buy Australian product—

and quite frankly was astounded that he did not seem to care.

Yet we have the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) writing to small businesses in April 1997 saying:

My pledge now is to continue to listen to small business and work in tangible ways to make running a business easier.

Australian Made was never broken; why on earth did this government seek to fix it? The government has to do two things as a matter of urgency: it ought to give back the licence fees paid under false pretences after the Advance Australia Foundation went into voluntary liquidation; and it should restore the Australian Made campaign with a code of practice, promotional support and a protection mechanism so that small business can get on with the job at hand. This is a government that says, `We are the friends of small business.' With friends like these, who needs enemies?