Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in strong support of the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 and the Future Made in Australia (Omnibus Amendments No. 1) Bill 2024.. A Future Made in Australia is a blueprint for sustainable economic growth, for reindustrialising our nation and for national security. It is a pushback against the politics of pessimism that has sent our manufacturing sector into meltdown and sent secure, well-paid jobs to the wall.

In order to appreciate the enormity and the impact of A Future Made in Australia, you first have to look at the past. It wasn't that long ago, around 11 years ago, that a Liberal Treasurer stood not far from where I am now and basically said, 'Either you're here or you're not.' Those were the words spoken, and the next day Holden announced that they were leaving Australia, and two months later so did Toyota. That was the end of 69 years of an automotive industry in this country that mass-produced excellent vehicles—boarded up, gone. Thousands of jobs were gone, along with the legacy. We missed the EV wave. We missed becoming a destination for well-paid blue- and white-colour jobs. Knowledge workers had no destination in a high-tech industry like cars. We are now a country that supplies the lithium for the battery cells that power the EV revolution and sells it at around $4,000 per tonne, only to buy it back as a $60,000 to $100,000 EV. It doesn't make any sense.

This decline in our manufacturing sector, however, did not happen overnight. It has been death by a thousand cuts—a thousand job cuts, that is. What we have seen is a decline in the complexity of our economy, and complexity is measured as the sophistication of our exports. Out of 133 countries, Australia ranks 93rd, sandwiched between Uganda and Pakistan. In 1995, however, we were ranked 55th. We've dropped 12 places in the last decade. It's been a gradual decline but a decline nevertheless, and these problems have come home to roost. When we carve out the rich countries by looking purely at the countries of the OECD, the picture is even bleaker. Data from 2022 showed that Australia ranks last in the OECD for sovereign manufacturing capability. We actually win the wooden spoon for that one.

This simply cannot continue. It will condemn us to slow, anaemic growth as demands on our public finances from health, aged care, education and housing only increase. The status quo or more of the same is a recipe for lowering our standard of living, not raising it. It has been accepted that two to three per cent is the most Australia can aspire to when it comes to GDP growth per year, and five per cent or more is for highly complex economies like China. We just accept that that's our lot in life. Well, it's not our lot in life. That's not the future this Labor government envisages for Australia. More of the same is simply untenable.

A Future Made in Australia is about value-adding to our abundant natural resources. Rather than picking winners as some claim, we are picking markets—markets where we have a competitive advantage, an edge, if you like. We intend to turn iron ore into green steel, which is needed for wind turbines, for modernising our energy grid, for the built environment and for making cars, which I hope to one day see again made in Australia. It's about turning sand into silicon ingots, which are then sliced wafer thin to turn into solar panels. Some say that we simply can't compete against China. Well, guess what: Australia actually invented the world's most efficient solar panel. We would be mad to turn our back on an innovation like that, so that's why we backed it in with the $1 billion Solar Sunshot program, to see a coal-fired power station in the Hunter turned into a renewable energy zone where these solar panels will be made. This is not a fantasy. It is not a slogan. It is actually happening right now. We will be taking our lithium ore and our critical minerals and processing them here. We may not be able to process all of it, but we can at least take some of the steps in order to value-add before we ship it off.

We need to make vaccines. If there's one thing the pandemic taught us, it's that we must have sovereign capability in making medicines and vaccines.

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