REDIRECTING $4 million from the state government’s payroll tax break for the Orange Electrolux plant into a jobs fund hasn’t been ruled out.
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But Orange is unlikely to score hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the city’s jobs prospects according to Member for Orange Andrew Gee.
Electrolux’s managing director of Australia and New Zealand John Brown, plant manager Mark O’Kane, and Orange City Council general manager Garry Styles met with Mr Gee yesterday to discuss the wind down of Electrolux over the next two years and the company’s approach to retraining its workers.
Mr Gee said any potential funds to boost jobs would be part of the second prong in responding to Electrolux’s closure after initiatives for retraining were established.
“All opportunities are on the table, but we won’t be rushing into anything,” he said.
“Throwing money up against a wall won’t do anyone any good.”
He would not speculate on how much money the state government could pledge.
However, he was more flippant in his weekly column joking about it being Christmas, but saying suggestions the council should be handed hundreds of millions of dollars were ‘unrealistic’.
Dr Brown said following Electrolux’s most recent factory closure, of its Beverley plant in Adelaide in 2006, the federal and state government offered support for the plant’s employees.
“We recognise a difference, when you close a factory in a major city the range of opportunities for alternate employment are probably wider and larger than a regional city such as Orange,” he said.
Dr Brown said Beverley had faced a similar situation to Orange and Electrolux had found it was about retraining and reskilling the workforce for changing opportunities.
Although there will be “limited” job opportunities for employees wanting to work for Electrolux elsewhere in Australia or overseas, Dr Brown said the jobs would not number in the hundreds.
Quotes from firms wanting to prepare a jobs creation strategy for the city will close next Tuesday, as part of the council’s $1.1 million pledge to boost jobs following the closure.
Mr Styles said the strategy would look at what had happened elsewhere and could also consider future uses of the plant’s site.
The plant will be wound down in three steps, beginning with about one-third of the plant’s employees being let go in the second half of 2015 when the first products begin to be made overseas.
Dr Brown said the research and design (R&D) department would remain in Orange until at least 2018 but beyond that its future was yet to be determined.
