Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I love reading Ross Gittins on the day when we are speaking on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and related bills. Only 10 minutes ago I was actually reading Ross Gittins's piece in the Canberra Times, but it could be out of any paper right across the nation. He is talking about something that was of key importance to me that I wanted to speak about today. He talks about the views of Dr Mike Keating, 'a retired super-senior econocrat, whose contributions to the public debate are often greatly enlightening, especially relative to the official obfuscation.' Gittins says:

The Other Keating makes two important points. His first is that there's a lot more to be gained from paid employment than just money. 'Being employed creates many of the social contacts and sense of self-esteem that are vital to our individual wellbeing,' he says.

Gittins further quotes Keating:

'Increasing employment participation is most important if governments want to improve living standards, individual wellbeing and equality.'

Gittins, still referring to Keating, then says:

His second point is that, contrary to what some argue, the weak point in our participation isn't married women. Our overall rate of 'employment participation' as he calls it—the proportion of the working-age population with a paid job—is just under 61 per cent, which breaks down into averages of 67 per cent for men and 55 per cent for women.

Surprisingly, this overall 61 per cent is the same as it was 50 years ago. But its composition has changed markedly. Male employment participation is as much as 18 percentage points lower than it was in 1966, whereas the female rate is 15 percentage points higher. The decline for men is explained mainly by the decline in blue-collar jobs, as computerisation has eliminated many unskilled jobs. The rise for women reflects changing social attitudes and women's greater suitability for filling jobs in the ever-growing services sector.

Here's the point—

says Keating, as written by Ross Gittins—

Almost all the long-term decline in employment participation by men aged 25 to 55 was accounted for by those who didn't complete secondary school and have no further qualifications.

What's more, in that age range, employment participation is much lower for those who didn't complete year12 and have no further qualifications—71 per cent for men and 60 per cent for women—than it is for those who did complete schooling and have further qualifications: almost 18 percentage points higher for men and 22 percentage points for women.

Keating notes that the overall rate of employment participation for Australian women is only a little lower than for women in can comparable countries, and for women with tertiary qualifications there's virtually no difference.

Then he says:

Get it? It's not women who are causing our employment participation to be lower than we'd like, it's the less skilled.

He says:

"It is people whose educational qualifications are poor and who lack skills who have most scope to increase their employment participation."

People with skills do not have the scope to increase their employment participation:

So "the focus should be on policies to improve the job prospects of low-skilled and disadvantaged people."

It comes to my point today. Between the postcode of 3810 and the border—Pakenham to the border in Victoria—there are two electorates: Gippsland and McMillan. We rely extremely heavily on two main employers: Australian Paper, and the electricity industry or the coal industry or whatever you might like to call it. Although Australian Paper is not in my electorate, there are those in my electorate who are employed at Australian Paper. It is owned now by Nippon Paper. Previously, while I was there, it was owned by a former company. Nippon is one of the largest copy paper manufacturers in the world. Australian Paper has over 900 employees. It is the largest private employer in the Latrobe Valley. I will repeat that: it is the largest private employer in the Latrobe Valley. Australian Paper have already announced, sadly, that manufacturing operations at its only other mill in Australia, at Shoalhaven in New South Wales, will cease and close in 2015. Australian Paper is Australia's only manufacturer of white, uncoated cut sheet paper. It supplies nearly 50 per cent of Australia's requirements domestically in addition to supplying a similar amount to the export market. The remaining 50 per cent of the domestic market is supplied by imports from a variety of countries, primarily in Asia. Many employees who work at the Maryvale plant live in Warragul or Moe et cetera—for example, Tristan Branson, an engineer, who worked his way up at the Maryvale Mill and is now part of the management team at Australian Paper based at Ferntree Gully. He lives in Warragul in my electorate.

Australian Paper commissioned the Western Research Institute to study the local benefits of AP in the community. It found that Australian Paper's contribution to Australia's GDP is $754 million, $458.5 million to household income. It found that Australian Paper supports 5,928 jobs Australia-wide and generates $432 million or $1.81 per ream of paper in government revenue. AP's waste paper recycling project at Maryvale will contribute $110 million from construction to Australia's GDP, $51 million ongoing to Australia's GDP, $57 million to household income from construction, $19 million ongoing to household income, 967 jobs in the construction phase, which is now complete, and 246 ongoing jobs. Are we getting the importance of this one company to my area?

Availability and price of energy is a major challenge facing this country. Australian paper is an energy-intensive, trade-exposed business. Currently, Australian Paper have not been able to secure a gas contract beyond the life of their current contact, which will expire over the next couple of years. Therefore, the moratorium on gas exploration in Victoria is having a direct impact on the energy security of this company that is so important to Australia.

Darren Chester, the member for Gippsland, the CFMEU—which I have had a long and close association with in my electorate, especially the forestry branch and especially Michael O'Connor, who I consider a friend and who in the past I have put at the table beside the Prime Minister of the day—and the Committee for Gippsland have been running a campaign, along with myself, to encourage the federal government, as our responsibility, to procure Australian made copy paper. Only one minister so far has agreed, Minister Barnaby Joyce, and he has recently announced that his department would switch to procuring Australian made copy paper. There are still many other departments that do not, and this is unacceptable. We will be running a campaign and writing to every minister asking them to consider that the paper that they use in their departments is Australian paper.

This has been a long-running issue facing Australian Paper. As the member for McMillan from 1996 to 1998—and then thrown out again—I was very much a part of the process of holding that plant in place. Their complaint to the Australian Anti-Dumping Commission, and the commission's subsequent investigation, is ongoing and not seeming to get anywhere. The price of cut sheet paper imported from China has been steadily declining from 2009, and in early 2011 volumes from China began to rapidly escalate all of a sudden, tripling from pre-2011 levels and reducing the volume and market share of not only Australian Paper's product but also products imported from other countries.

In addition to suffering a loss of market share and sales volume, Australian Paper has been forced to reduce its prices and, as a result, take cost containment measures, which include reducing employment in both paper production and sales distribution. This has had a direct impact on the Gippsland region, in the context of not only the Maryvale mill but also its employees, who have been made redundant, and other local businesses and contractors who provide services to Australian Paper.

In the Anti-Dumping Commission's investigation, while Australian Paper was the most significantly impacted Australian party, it was not the only one. The Australian Forest Products Association noted that there had been a surge of cheap Chinese paper being sold in Australia over the past 18 months, and the impact that had on the local paper production market was considerable. The issue is not about trade protection. We have never been on about that. As Australian Forest Products Association's Ross Hampton said:

The industry has no beef with importers. We have to compete on our own two feet and on our own merit … But what the World Trade Organisation recognises, and what Australian law recognises, is that it's not a level playing field if a country over produces a commodity and then simply tries to get rid of it in another market at below its sale price in its own country. That's called dumping and that's the allegation here.'

In the few minutes that I have left I need to talk about the energy sector in the other big part of my electorate and, as Ross Gittins was talking about, jobs for people and jobs for the future.

What legacy do we—Darren Chester and I—want to leave? Whether I leave in 10 years' time or Darren leaves in 20 years' time, I do not know, but we would like to leave the legacy of better education, better roads, better opportunities for young people to get jobs in the sectors in their local communities, better hospitals, new hospitals, better health care, better aged care—and I can go on. We have below us this amazing opportunity that we call brown coal—and there are ways to use it outside of the uses that we have for it today. I have spoken with people about coal to fertiliser, coal to diesel, coal to gas and coal to oil. We have thousands of years of supply of this precious resource. Can you imagine if one of the legacies that Darren and I left from our time in this place as the members for McMillan and Gippsland was that we left a resource in the ground that could have been turned into diesel and would have meant that we as a nation would become self-sufficient in diesel just out of the Latrobe Valley?

Can you imagine that? We could be self-sufficient in diesel just out of the brown coal from the Latrobe Valley. That will then employ all the people that Ross Gittins and Dr Keating were talking about. It would make my 900 at AP look like a small group. Hundreds of people in the electricity industry in the Latrobe Valley supply us that precious resource which then turns the lights on across Australia. We could be getting our electricity from renewable sources, from solar power, or from whatever it may be in the future, but at the same time we could have our own diesel, which we own, in Australia. If we put the energy and the resources into having a vision for the future of the Latrobe Valley, that is greater than digging it out and burning it.

We have that opportunity now, to focus on into the next five, 10, 20 or 30 years, for a future that opens up employment for all sorts of people. We can then carry on and provide people with a greater education, greater opportunity and have more employment participation. There lies the future for us. It is not an old-fashioned 'dig it out of the ground'; it is an old-fashioned 'can we turn this into diesel'. Yes, we can. Can we turn it into oil? Yes, we can. Can we turn it into fertiliser? Yes, we can.

We can have a dream too. It is not an old cliche to have a dream about where a community might be into the future. As the Salvation Army has said, there are lower socioeconomic families that try to live on $17.80 a day, which is all that is left over after their household expenses. I would find that absolutely impossible to do. We, as a government, can open up a brighter economic future for those lower socioeconomic families. And, for the Latrobe Valley, it will make us an icon to the world. We could turn our assets into the future health, wellbeing and security of the people of the Latrobe Valley and the whole of Gippsland. We can be a world leader again. That is the dream I put before you, and there is opportunity. Let's enter into the research of where we are going to be with this amazing resource in the years ahead.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 12:58 to 16:00

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