Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Grayndler would not endorse her. Keep distracting, but these are the underlying truths sitting inside the factional wars of the Labor Party. The Leader of the Opposition stands up here and plays comedian for 10 minutes when at all times he is managing his own backbench to ensure his own job. The most frustrating part is that this is what cuts through outside this place, this is what you get in the front lines of Western Sydney: you get to talk about economic growth of 3.3 per cent—the highest rate since the GFC, with 180,000 jobs created in the last 12 months and 60 per cent of them for women. We have an economic plan which the Prime Minister keeps standing up and talking about. There are the free trade agreements. Reid has a strong local Chinese community, and we have young Chinese Australians who are opening up businesses or partnering with local businesses in Reid and employing other Australians as they start to export to China. That is where the 180,000 jobs created are coming from—the economic plan. And $195 billion will be spent on defence over the next 10 years, with 54 new naval vessels. In the six years of the previous government, there was not one. My personal favourite—I am biased because I am one of the ministers responsible—is the National Innovation and Science Agenda. We heard Minister Hunt today congratulate the prize winners from last night. There is a $200 million CSIRO fund to work with SMEs—my passion—to partner with them and to commercialise science, to take it to market; to take the concepts from institutions inside this country and commercialise them. Why? To create the growth that creates jobs. The $500 million Medical Translation Fund will work in one of our six growth centres, medical research. We are world leaders in that, but historically we have seen an exodus of our brains trust, our into intellectual property, offshore post-development. No more.

Dr Freelander interjecting—

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