Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I said in the first few weeks after the election of the Abbott government, when their lovely glossy plan started to unravel, that it was easy to make a joke about it. It was easy to laugh because it was actually very funny. Unfortunately, it is too serious to joke about. We have made a lot of jokes today. It is easy when you have a joke of a Treasurer and a joke of a Prime Minister to do just that, but now is not the time. It is not funny anymore.

You cannot afford to push the pause button for two years, or possibly three years, at this time in world history. Maybe 20 years ago—when you seem to think you are governing—you could do that. Maybe you could push the pause button for three years 20 or 25 years ago. The pace of change now and the opportunities in the world we need to exploit are too important and too urgent to push the pause button for three years. There is an urgent and pressing need for economic leadership, and we are not getting it from this government. We have not heard anything from the people opposite in this matter of public importance debate that suggests they even begin to understand the urgency and the need.

The world is changing faster than you can imagine. This is an age change. It has been coming for 20 years. It is the beginning of an age change that is going to profoundly change the way people work, who works, what they need to know and how business operates. We can see it—and we call it disruption—but it is much bigger than that. A wave of change is coming and Australia is going to ride it or drown in it. If this government continues to ignore it, continues to push us backwards and continues to kill off our capacity every day to take those challenges on, we will drown in it and this government will wear it.

I will give an example of a crisis that is approaching very fast. It started with this government two years ago when they dared the car industry to leave. We are already seeing now engineers being laid off in those car companies. I am not going to talk about the car companies; I am going to talk about the global fragmented supply chain that we should be getting into. Capacity is not just teaching STEM in schools; it is actually keeping that capacity in our businesses. Investment went into those businesses and built that capacity and skill. We are about to see thousands of those businesses go to the wall at the very time when global supply chains are fragmenting and borders within corporations are falling down. We need those companies to survive.

Mr Pasin interjecting—

I hear the interjection and I am going to take it. This is a government with so little experience in governing that it thinks that just being open for business is enough. It thinks that opening a door without having companies to go through it is enough. You need companies that have the capacity to go through that door. In the last two years it has killed thousands of them. There has been an 80 per cent reduction in renewable energy investment in this country. I had 13 solar installers and now I have got one. It is a growth industry all around the world. This government killed it off at the very time we should be growing it. It is killing off our capacity to manufacture. We will lose one-fifth of our manufacturing sector when those car industries close. Do the maths, if you are capable. We will lose one-fifth of our advanced manufacturing capacity because the government dared the car industry to leave this country.

This is the government that we have. At the very time when Australian businesses should be developing that capacity and moving into global supply chains, at the time when advanced manufacturing makes labour costs less of an issue when you are competing with our neighbours to the north and when our dollar is back at a reasonable level, we have a government killing off the future. It is killing it off.

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