Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to stand and talk about manufacturing because it's an incredibly important area, particularly given the changes in manufacturing that we have seen across the world in the last 10 to 15 or even 20 years. When globalisation really picked up people moved factories offshore, but now what we are seeing around the world is expertise in particular areas and the fragmentation of the supply chain and places elsewhere in the world focusing on small parts of the supply chain and becoming regional experts in that. Yet what we have got in Australia is a manufacturing policy—even now that the government has announced a new one—that is really decades behind where it should be. We have seen a government that abolished Labor's manufacturing plan back in 2014 and has replaced it with a smaller version now, some seven years later. We have had a government that essentially bullied Holden to leave the country at the very time when the supply chains for car manufacturing were fragmenting in such a way that we were actually in a very, very good place. Also, the dollar was high at the time. We had manufacturing at that time under pressure because of the high dollar and we lost viable companies because of that. Now, seven years late, we've got the member for Lindsay standing here and moving a very important motion and saying, 'We're in a new era of manufacturing.' Well, the world has been in a new era for a long time, and it's really too little, too late. I want to focus on that for the moment.

We have a government that's announced a $1.5 billion advanced manufacturing plan—sounds great. We've got a crisis at the moment. We need jobs. We need stimulus, and they've come in with manufacturing too late but good. But then you look at the detail—with this government you always have to look at the detail. It might be $1.5 billion over four years, but this financial year, when the crisis is here right now, it's $40 million—$79 million in budget for this year, underspend $40 million. That's it for manufacturing in Australia. 'New era,' says the member for Lindsay—$40 million this financial year. That $1.5 billion is spread out over four years and $800 million of it is going to the grants program for an estimated, according to the minister, 10 companies. So the great new era of manufacturing spends $40 million this financial year when we have a crisis that is seeing manufacturers shut their doors, and $800 million to 10 companies over the next four years. That's what we have here. That's what we have in this plan.

We also have an announced $2 billion for R&D—sounds good. They've pulled money out of R&D. They haven't been doing really well, so $2 billion for R&D sounds really good until you realise there's a bill before the House right now that cuts $1.8 billion. It sounds like they've just changed their mind and announced it as new money. Again, when you hear this government talk about anything, you have to question the detail because the detail is nearly always different to the headline announcement.

Australia, historically, has been really good at manufacturing. We've seen some bad years recently. We've seen companies go in COVID. We've also seen, over the last seven or eight years, some major international trends that cause difficulties for some of manufacturers and we've lost a lot. But in my electorate we have some amazing ones. We have Thales, one of our big defence manufacturers, based in Rydalmere. It's an extraordinary one, and because it works with really fine quality ceramics we've have seen a ceramics industry grow up around it. Wherever you have one really good company with fragmented supply chains, you have other companies that grow the skill base around it.

We've got BluGlass, LED technology. It's still what I call pre profit. It's incredible new technology. They're called BluGlass, but they're now a world leader in green LEDs. They have companies all over the world that buy LEDs of various frequencies from Rydalmere—an extraordinary company.

We have Baxter's medicinal grade saline, the last remaining one in the country. There's an area, if you're talking about resilience and the capacity to respond where the government might look to make sure that we have medicinal grade plastic, medicinal grade salines—all the things that we need in a crisis—manufactured in Australia, because we have lost them over the last seven years and we have one left. It's a nice announcement, but look at the detail. The new era was some time ago. It's a wee bit late and it's too little.

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