Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Republic) Share this | Hansard source

As the Leader of the Opposition in the parliament says, they came out with the claim that they were going to ruin the weekend and destroy the future—that tradies would be put out of work if they moved to electric vehicles. It's ridiculous. It's insane, really, that our government is not supporting these innovations being developed in our universities. Any other nation in the world would be very proud of this and would be saying: 'What can we do to boost your industry? We'll invest in it, we'll get the private sector to invest in it and we'll make sure that we create jobs here in our country, not have you go overseas to commercialise your technology.' But that's sadly lacking from this government when it comes to support for research and development for innovation in this country, and the best that it can come up with is a name change. It's quite pathetic.

As a nation we've gone backwards in our rankings when it comes to our university sector, falling, since 2018, three positions. The Go8 figures indicate that Australia scores below average for its income group for knowledge and technology outputs. Over eight long years of a divided coalition government being in office, Australia has lost an estimated 90,000 jobs in manufacturing, and there are 140,000 fewer people doing apprenticeships or traineeships than there were when this government came to office. Think of those opportunities for Australia in innovation and in job creation that have been squandered under this government. Labor agrees that the government needs to think more about links between industry, innovation and science. The facts are clear, and the facts are that we're falling behind.

The Morrison government needs to spend more time addressing the problems that it has created and less time on marketing and spin, but unfortunately that's all this bill is. It's a situation of marketing and spin, and it won't deliver. It won't deliver the necessary stimulus and the necessary encouragement for greater investment in research and development by Australian corporations. It's one of the many areas, along with labour productivity and business investment, that Australia is falling further and further behind on. We're actually going backwards under this government. The amount of dollars that Australian corporations are devoting to research and development has fallen as a proportion of GDP by about 1½ per cent since this government came to office. That's going backwards. That's not something that we should be proud of.

We should be going the other way. We're a wealthy nation with high living standards and incomes. Particularly at this point in time in our economic development, when we're coming out of a recession and the government is looking to stimulate the economy, an area where you're going to get productivity improvement and growth in the future is investment in research and development and job creation. But this government isn't interested. It's all about the announcement and the spin rather than the delivery. And that's the great shame of this particular piece of legislation: like everything that this government does in this area, it's a wasted opportunity. That's why I'm supporting the amendment that has been moved by the member for Chifley.

Debate interrupted.

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