Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We all know that the mining industry is booming. There is a high demand for our commodities and we have the strongest terms of trade in living memory. The positives of this are enjoyed by those who live in the mining regions as there is strong employment and wealth has been generated. It is an important source of revenue for state and federal governments that provides money for schools, roads, hospitals and ports—and, dare I say, tax cuts for all Australians. The strength of mining and the relative weakness of the US dollar has delivered the strongest Australian dollar in decades. Treasury is forecasting that the dollar will remain above parity for many years to come. This means that consumers are paying less for imported goods, like clothing, electronic goods and IT equipment, and it is helping to suppress inflation. It also means that petrol prices are lower than they otherwise would be.

But for many industries, particularly manufacturing, the story is not so rosy. The high Australian dollar means that our manufactured goods are struggling to compete. Factories are threatening closure and jobs are threatened. For those workers, the glitter of the golden age of mining boom mark 2 seems a little bit out of reach. The high Australian dollar makes the products they manufacture more expensive than the cheaper imports and this is exacerbated when imported products are dumped on our markets at below production cost. They see their imported manufactured goods used in resource and construction projects as substitutes for locally produced goods. This is an issue that is affecting my electorate and the electorate of my colleague the member for Cunningham.

It is not the first time that manufacturing industry has gone through this challenge. The recession of the 1980s and the opening up of our product markets led to significant job losses. Then, as now, there was a need for government to intervene to provide assistance to industry, to provide assistance to companies and to provide assistance to workers to make adjustments. Then, as now, the situation lent itself to exploitation by the unscrupulous, who would peddle simplistic solutions or who would suggest that if we ignored what was going on in the world around us it would all go away. The simple fact is that workers are not mugs. They know when somebody is spinning nonsense. They have heard it all before from bosses, politicians, the media and anybody else who would like to jump on the bandwagon and try to pull the wool over their eyes. The simplest of solutions, it is sometimes suggested, is that we put a wall up around ourselves and pretend that we are somehow separate from what is going on in the world around us. Equally simplistic is to suggest that we should leave it all to the markets to determine how and where investment should occur and how jobs are created. Under this solution we would allow some industries to fail and the workers and the investment to flow to where they can make more money. I reject both of these propositions. There has to be a middle way, a way that recognises the opening up of our product markets has led to cheaper goods at home and that a boom in export earnings has seen our services sector balloon. But if we are to spread the benefits of the mining boom then we have to look after local manufacturing and we have to look after the workers who work in local manufacturing industries.

I am committed to putting a price on carbon. The reason I believe this is the best way to lower our carbon emissions is that we create an incentive for industry to look for ways to lower the cost of energy and to look for less carbon intensive production processes. There are some industries, however, where this is not the case because of their very nature, and steel is one such industry. About 80 per cent of emissions in the production of steel come from the chemical process of converting iron ore to steel and casting and rolling it into a product. For this reason, the imposition of a carbon price will have little or no impact on reducing carbon emissions unless we stop using steel, and that is not going to happen in the near future.

This is why I have called for the exclusion of the BlueScope Steel plant in my electorate of Throsby from the imposition of a carbon price in relation to its steel-making activities. This should account for no less than 95 per cent of its emissions. Of course, exempting the overwhelming majority of BlueScope's activities from the imposition of a carbon price will not deal with the broader issues that we face with the high Australian dollar. (Time expired)

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