Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Barker for his question and for his relentless focus on jobs—in his electorate and across Australia—and on a technology led approach to reducing emissions. That's his focus and that's the focus of all of us on this side of this place—creating jobs and creating opportunity for Australians. In the manufacturing sector, which is strong in his electorate, we've seen in the last three months alone another 91,000 jobs added. That's more than 80,000 jobs more than before the pandemic. We now have over a million people working in manufacturing again, and we haven't seen that since Labor put in place their carbon tax.

Local manufacturers are going from strength to strength, and that includes businesses in the member's electorate like Mondelez, which is one of Australia's largest food manufacturers with more than 100 years of experience in manufacturing behind them and 2,000 local employees. They research, develop, manufacture and sell great products. They're investigating and working on ways now to drive 50 per cent energy efficiency across their operations, and one of the ways they're doing that is by installing solar. We are a world-beater in solar. That's technology, not taxes, at work.

We know from the latest data that Australia's emissions are over 20 per cent down since 2005. We're reducing emissions while we're creating jobs and driving investment, and that's because we're taking a 'technology, not taxes' approach. It's technology, not taxes, that strengthens our regions and our traditional industries, like agriculture, resources and heavy manufacturing. It's that technology led approach that will ensure that we can continue to bring down emissions whilst creating jobs and continuing to drive that investment, including export opportunities for our world-beating export sectors. Technologies that are crucial to achieving that are technologies like hydrogen, soil carbon, carbon capture and storage, stored energy, clean steel, and aluminium. They are all in our technology investment road map, focused in each case on getting those costs down to a point where we see rapid uptake.

Just a few weeks ago we opened our $464 million clean hydrogen hubs program to support the development of up to seven hydrogen hubs across Australia. That makes the total investment in hydrogen $1.2 billion of the total $20 billion we're spending on emerging technologies. We're backing technology. Those opposite will always back taxes.

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