Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The National Reconstruction Fund is ill considered and I fear will be poorly implemented. I'm here, very strongly, to provide my commentary and my view. I do that as the member for Barker. The House might not be aware, but in terms of manufacturing Barker is the electorate division in Australia that has more people employed in full-time employment in food manufacturing than any other electorate in this place. I'm not much of a pin-up boy, but when it comes to the grocery council of Australia I'm it—sometimes perhaps because I consume far too much of their product! The reality is food manufacturing is going gangbusters in Barker, or at least it has been. There are significant headwinds pressing up against the ability of Barker's manufacturers to take the opportunities that world-leading free trade agreements—established by the former coalition government—with some of the most populated and aspiring countries around the world. They are headwinds that are pushing back the opportunity not only for those manufacturers but for people working in those sectors. Importantly, from my perspective, and I know it's important to other people in this place, it's pushing back opportunities for primary producers who provide the raw product that goes into manufacturing facilities and comes out as some of the world's most valued food and fibre.

What are those headwinds? These are headwinds that this bill and this effort should be targeted towards, but in fact without addressing those headwinds this is a complete waste of time. Those headwinds that I speak of are labour shortages for the sector and energy costs. Not a month ago I came to this House with a really stark and particular example of what energy costs are doing to manufacturers in my electorate. Nippy's are fruit packers and fruit juice and otherwise drink producers in my electorate. It's a third generation family business. It's family owned. All of their product is Australian grown. They came to me alarmed that their energy bill was going to from at gargantuan $900,000 to $1.8 million. This is a relatively large business. It was going to increase by 92½ per cent. Imagine opening that email. Well, that's what Ben Knispel did in that business. Then imagine him having to take that email to his parents, Jeff and Tina, who have worked so hard in their lives to establish that business, and having to say, 'Mum and Dad, I've got some bad news for you.' 'What's that, son?' 'Well, the electricity bill is going up.' 'By how much?' 'By almost double.'

That's bad enough news for the Knispel family and for Nippy's, and for everyone who works in that business, like the citrus producers that provide the product that go into what I think—well, I know—is Australia's best fruit juice. But I'll tell you who it's really bad news for: the mum-and-dad consumers who are wheeling their trolleys down the aisle of Woolworths or Coles and who really want to buy that 100 per cent Aussie-grown fruit juice. Instead, as the price of that product necessarily increases because the cost of producing it in Australia increases, they look to cheap substitutes. Of course they would; they have to. I don't blame them for that, I get it. In this place we talk about the cost-of-living crisis, or the crunch. Well, the crunch occurs, item by item, as you walk down grocery aisles. When it comes to fresh fruit juice, the alternatives are cheap and nasty concentrates which have been rehydrated from foreign concentrates. But that's where we're pushing Australian manufacturers. We're pushing them to the wall because they're competing with jurisdictions that have cheaper costs for energy and cheaper costs for labour.

While I'm on the question of labour: the second thing that this government should be looking to address in this space is labour force shortages. A number of years ago I'd visit the odd employer who would say to me, 'Tony, we're having some difficulty accessing short-term labour.' It was often in fruit picking and the more difficult kind of work. I'm here to tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander—in fact, I don't need to tell you—that everyone in this House is having the same conversations I'm having, I am sure, with employers who speak variously politely and less politely—in my case, scream at me—about the need for more people in the labour market.

We're seeing two things occurring in my electorate, and I confirmed it with employers who were visiting Parliament House yesterday. There's a capital strike going on—that is, manufacturers are not investing in capital. That's not because they don't have capital, which I want to address in a minute in terms of the bill. They've got access to capital—there's no issue about that. But the reason there's a strike on is because they've got no confidence that, when they expend the capital and they expand their plant and equipment, they'll have the staff they need to undertake that manufacturing activity. That's why there's a capital strike.

To the extent that any of them are expending capital in my electorate at the moment, they're all doing so to substitute automation for labour. They're not doing that because it's cheaper, which is the rhetoric that you sometimes hear—not necessarily from those opposite, but in the civic square from other participants. They're doing it because they need to de-risk their businesses. They need to de-risk their businesses from the prospect of not having a workforce to be able to do this work. So, increasingly, when I visit manufacturing businesses in my electorate, nobody drives a forklift anymore. These are all automated vehicles. It looks a little bit like something off the set of Dr Who. But businesses are spending gargantuan sums of money to do that for no reason other than they've tried and tried to fill those roles. Instead, what they do is spend, as I said, gargantuan sums of money to automate those processes.

For those opposite, the priorities are all wrong here. This is a bill that effectively tries to incentivise, with capital, manufacturing development in our country. I'm pretty close to those manufacturers, and I can tell you that there's no shortage of capital for them. What there is is nervousness. That nervousness is born of the cost of energy and the uncertainty around our labour markets. Solve those problems first, before you try to pat yourself on the back in this place because you're standing up for Australian jobs and Australian manufacturers. With respect—and as someone who has a bit to say during question time, much to the frustration, I think, of the Speaker—if that were true, I wouldn't be able to easily barb the relevant minister about his paper. You'd think that the federal Minister for Industry and Science would be the first person to buy Aussie paper. But, because I'm able to barb him, it's a classic example of what's going on in this country.

You see, I and other members of this place have people come to us from time to time concerned about the prospect of various industries. There are two industries I'm desperately concerned about in the Australian business ecosystem—those that are involved with cement and aluminium. The Portland Aluminium smelter is in the member for Wannon's electorate, but it's effectively a pitching wedge from mine. There are many people who live in my electorate but work at that smelter. The risk we face with the agenda that's being pursued aggressively by those opposite is that those businesses—and there are literally a handful of smelters lefts in in this country—become unviable. What would then happen? Nobody in this place presumably anticipates that, as a result of that, Australians would consume or use less aluminium. That's not going to happen.

What's going to happen is that our ore will be put on boats; it will be shipped overseas; it will be processed into aluminium; and then it will come back to Australia, again on a boat, either as a finished product or as a refined product for manufacturing. That's a bad outcome for Australian manufacturing. It's a bad outcome for Aussie jobs. I'd suggest to you it's a really bad outcome for the environment. That's because, assuming, if I could for a moment—which I don't think we should—the environmental standards in the country that our manufacturing effort exports itself to are exactly the same as Australia's, which I think is unlikely, you've got the footprint of taking massive amounts of ore overseas, only to bring back the refined product. As I said, that presupposes that the environmental standards in other jurisdictions are equal to Australia's, which I think we can accept is unlikely to be the case. The more likely reality is that we would create a massive footprint shifting material OS and bringing it back, only to manufacture it in a jurisdiction that has less stringent regulations around environmental protocols, pollution, energy, carbon, carbon abatement et cetera. But that's what this aggressive agenda is doing.

On the one hand, you've got the minister for carbon reduction fighting for these outcomes, and on the other hand you've got the minister for industry saying, 'We're all about Aussie jobs.' I'm really struggling to draw the connection between the two. But it's not just me; it's Australian manufacturers, who feel like they're on an extinction pathway. Trust me. I speak to them all the time, and they say, 'Tony, it's getting harder and harder.' You see, I don't want that to be the future of Australian manufacturing. Those opposite are fond of saying, 'The car industry is not here anymore; Australian manufacturing is dead; we don't make things anymore.' Rubbish! Like I said, there are more people employed in food and fibre manufacturing in my electorate than in any other division and it is the No. 1 cohort of employers. We manufacture all sorts of products that the world is desperate for: proteins, milk products, wood, wine.

What we need is a government that understands what the headwinds are and doesn't come up with a shiny new thing that they can market in a retail political space saying, 'Look at us. We want to be the government that makes things again.' Please! Provide the settings that business needs to get ahead. Back manufacturers in.

The first thing you could do is say, 'We're going to take an agnostic approach to energy generation in this country.' What we've got to do is find the cheapest form of energy generation now, in the medium term and in the long term. Before those opposite say, 'That's renewables'—it may well be in the long term, but right now without baseload renewables, it's not. And solve the issue around labour shortages, please, but not by a lottery that allows those Pacific Islanders who win the lottery to leave their homes. Solve those two problems before you rush in here with this shiny product and ask me to vote for it.

See this speech in context