Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a few quick remarks in reply to the minister. Firstly, which I should have said in my first speech: thank you for your engagement on this. It has been incredibly constructive, and I appreciate your genuine openness to the conversations. The reason I'm focusing on market failure is we have a $3 trillion super industry in this country. We have a huge amount of private money. If private money can get behind these industries, they're going to have a huge opportunity to drive even further. I'm very supportive of private money getting behind there, and I don't want public money to confuse that. I want public money to enable that and then private money to take off. I'm focused on where public money can be spent to reduce market failure and then later enable private money to get in there. Also, from a policy and regulation point of view, I want to understand why, if there are opportunities there and there is no market failure, private isn't money getting in there and what we can do to help them drive that.

In relation to the areas that you identified, I appreciate it came from that CSIRO report—it's a very good report. My concern is it was written in 2020, some distance ago, and we were in a very different time. Secondly, as I understand, the fund has not been completely allocated, so there is still money that may go to different sectors. It's my particular concern that money that goes to different sectors is allocated effectively where there is market failure or on the basis of really rigorous analysis. Finally, on your point on inflation and trying to do inflation reduction, I take your point on that but I think we need to note that part of the driver of inflation in this country and around the world is very high government spending out of the pandemic. This is why I have a concern on this and all government spending now, because there is a public sector driver of inflation. We have, for good reason, spent a lot of money, but that is one of the drivers of inflation along with supply chain issues across the world.

I support local manufacturing. My family business manufactures locally, which makes us pretty unusual. But at the same time, I'm conscious that if making products locally—particularly in this green transition—means that they're much more expensive than they otherwise would be, or they are slower or harder to bring to market, then we will be costing ourselves more in this transition. We have to think very carefully about this balance and how to make sure that whatever we are supporting is, over the long term, either critically required from a supply chain reliability or is otherwise able to, at some point, stand on its own two feet so the government doesn't always have to step in.

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