Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's absolutely fantastic that those opposite have given us the opportunity to talk about what we do best: creating jobs and keeping people in jobs. Thank you. Last week, I stood with members of my community on Dunheved Road and announced an extra $63½ million, which is in this federal budget, bringing the total amount the Morrison government is contributing to Dunheved Road to $127 million. This is such an important project for our community, because it gets people to work and home again more safely and more quickly and, very importantly, it creates local jobs.

Our economic recovery depends on infrastructure and policies that create jobs. At a local level, I've been working hard to connect our students to the jobs of the future, in industries like manufacturing, in my Lindsay Jobs of the Future Forum. It gives us an opportunity to connect schools with universities and business and to ensure that our children are educated and trained for the jobs that are coming to Western Sydney. In Lindsay, we know that the pathways to those jobs of the future are in emerging industries and also through apprenticeships. I've visited many local manufacturers in Western Sydney—like Grant Engineered in Emu Plains, who have four young apprentices learning from the best and gaining valuable skills and experience.

The Morrison government is providing 100,000 new apprenticeships to support the next generation of skilled workers and to help jobseekers reskill and get back into work. This $1.2 billion boosting apprenticeship commencements wage subsidy will help more companies like Grant Engineered to take on apprentices. This comes on the back of our $2.8 billion supporting apprentices and trainees package, now expected to support 90,000 employers to keep 180,000 apprentices and trainees in employment and training. This is all about jobs. Many of these apprentices will go on to contribute to the new era in Australian manufacturing, which will play such an important role in our economic recovery.

I established the Advancing Manufacturing Taskforce to unlock opportunities that will put Western Sydney at the forefront of the new era and to address any barriers to that. The measures announced in the budget are a win for manufacturers in my electorate of Lindsay, with a range of support to make them more competitive and to create those local jobs. We're investing $1.5 billion over four years for the Modern Manufacturing Strategy and $1.3 billion to support projects within our six national manufacturing priorities. These are critical minerals processing and resources technology; medical products—and I know that many manufacturers across Lindsay put up their hands during the coronavirus pandemic to manufacture critical supplies and medical products; defence industry; space industry—again, there's a growing space industry in Western Sydney, with the building of the Western Sydney International Airport, and I look forward to our children having the opportunities of the jobs in this emerging space industry; clean energy and recycling; and food and beverage products. We're also expanding the Manufacturing Modernisation Fund, and I know that many businesses across Western Sydney, as well as Western Sydney University, took advantage of this fund. There's $100 million for the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative to address and identify our supply chain vulnerabilities. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that we need to harness our own strengths, particularly in supply chains, when it comes to manufacturing. This will support businesses in Lindsay like SpanSet, Solution Design Group, Pandrol and J Sinclair Engineering.

The $5.3 billion investment in the Western Sydney airport and aerotropolis precinct will create a hub for emerging industries in advanced manufacturing, defence industry, research, medicine and more. It couldn't be more about jobs, what's going on in Western Sydney, and I'm so proud of the work that we are doing there. These skills reforms will contribute to supporting the creation of local jobs for local people so that people don't have to commute long hours out of our community every single day. Three hundred thousand people currently commute from Western Sydney to their job.

There are nearly 15,000 small and medium-sized businesses in Lindsay. Every day, hardworking families invest their time and energy, do long hours and don't ask for much in return. That's why last night we announced—

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