“Only an incompetent government would allow the closure of ABC Learning Centres and the North-South Railway,” CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood declared this morning.

“The solution is straightforward—take them over, nationalise them.”

“ABC Learning and the North-South Railway are merely the first wave of what will be a flood of bankruptcies, as the global economic collapse deepens,” Mr Isherwood pointed out.

“The global financial crisis is far from over. At least 30 per cent of Chinese steel and iron firms have already stopped production, and many hundreds of shoe, textile and toy factories are shutting down. Meanwhile, tonnes of our (mostly perishable) exports are sitting at overseas ports as importers are refused credit, hitting the Australian economy hard.”

Mr Isherwood called on the government to use its response to the two collapses, to establish the principle that the general welfare of the people must come first.

“ABC Learning is a child-care provider; therefore, it should be taken over and absorbed into a national child-care service, which would save the carers’ jobs, and avert chaos among about 100,000 ‘working families’, and the companies they work for.

“The North-South Railway should be reorganised to become what it always should have been—a wholly government-owned national development project, to open up the inland of Australia.”

Mr Isherwood contrasted the importance of ABC Learning and the North-South Railway to collapsed finance-sector companies like Allco Finance Group, which he said the government should definitely not save.

“Only save what’s real—the services, the infrastructure—but definitely not the speculators,” he said.

For further information, contact Jeremy Beck on 03 9354 0544.