Tony Abbott likes chocolate, but car makers and airlines must fend for themselves During the election campaign, Abbott flew to Tasmania and blithely handed a gift of $16 million to the Cadbury chocolate factory. Australia's rent seekers are firmly on notice: it is the end of corporate welfare. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has never been so direct: no government has ever subsidised its way to prosperity, he declared, adding a good kick from his R.M. Williams boot to the stupidity of "knee-jerk piecemeal deals." What a difference a few months makes. Cadbury is owned by a multinational firm that had reported a 64 per cent rise in its profit to $74.9 million last year. Cadbury ... should consider themselves mightily blessed by old-style campaign pragmatism. Abbott at the time argued that Tasmania had been "left behind, big time" on almost all economic measures, and his was a pragmatic approach to a special case in aid of "job, jobs and jobs." It was, of course, an election campaign, and Abbott, who was not yet prime minister, had his eye on a number of juicy Tasmanian seats. You could call his gift politically pragmatic, but you could also call it corporate welfare and a campaign-motivated knee-jerk piecemeal deal. Now that he is Prime Minister and a vastly bigger company, GM Holden, has announced its decision to quit Australia, Abbott has seized the opportunity to return to what has been his reasonably consistent theme about corporate welfare - if you ignore the Cadbury deal. Faced with a ballooning deficit, Abbott needed to elucidate a coherent approach. With Holden going, Qantas is also knocking on the government's door for assistance. So is SPC Ardmona. "We're not here to sort of build a field of dreams," the Prime Minister offered. He had the same sort of message for SPC Ardmona that he had delivered to Qantas: get your own house in order. His response to the difficulty of assisting the thousands of car-industry workers who will find themselves out of jobs is less coherent. A package of about $100 million - $60 million from the Commonwealth, $12 million from Victoria, incomplete negotiations towards another $12 million from South Australia and "$20 million, perhaps, out of Holden" - is insignificant compared with the vast amounts the Coalition had previously committed to the car industry. Labor was promising $1.5 billion in industry assistance to 2015 and $300 million a year after that. The Coalition had promised to strip $500 million from that pre-2015 funding - which still left $1 billion - and still on the table was $200 million a year for the five years to 2020. Precisely how this will operate depends on the findings of various reviews, apart from vague promises of helping component manufacturers to change their businesses to non-automotive and export operations, assist businesses that employ former automotive workers and grants for research and development. Beyond that, former workers will have to rely on the dole, redundancies or - on the advice of the Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane - move to other regions to find work. Cadbury and its employees, who got more than a quarter of the amount Abbott's government is now offering the endangered car industry workforce, should consider themselves mightily blessed by old-style campaign pragmatism.