Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

'Coulda, woulda, shoulda'—if only they'd been in government for the last 10 years they could have done all those things the last speaker just said he wishes they could do!

Politicians often get accused of thinking too short-term. I hear that. In my community, you hear it around, particularly from older Australians: 'Why is everything so short-term?' That's sometimes a fair criticism; it is. And sometimes it's not. Three-year terms don't help, as I'm sure most people would agree. I think Bob Hawke tried to deal with that—a little constitutional change in the 1980s—and it got voted down. Maybe you'd get a different result now, given that Australians have experienced four-year state and territory government terms now. But the truth is that we should do more long-term things, I reckon. I think particularly, though, we should welcome it when governments of either side bring forward propositions, bring forward legislation to the parliament that is about the long term. The Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 is absolutely about the long term for our country.

I've always maintained that it's Labor governments that are called into being by the Australian people to do those big things. If you look through the history of our country, it's Labor governments that make the big changes, such as Medicare under Bob Hawke. We on the Labor side of politics spent 20 years trying to build a universal healthcare system.

An honourable member: Gough Whitlam.

That's right: Gough Whitlam had a crack. Then the Liberals got in, under Malcolm Fraser, and abolished it. Then Bob Hawke put it in, and you went to election after election after election promising to abolish Medicare, to abolish the universal healthcare system, until finally even this mob figured out that they couldn't win an election in this country without at least pretending to support Medicare. That's what they do: they pretend to support it. Similarly with the superannuation system: it was the Labor government that did that big long-term thing and put in the superannuation system. And of course this mob pretend to support it and then nibble away, nibble away, undermine, cut, cut, cut. It's a Labor government now that's building the early childhood education system. One of the smartest investments that our country could make if we wanted to be a wealthier country 20 or 30 years from now would be in the human capital of the next generation.

Similarly, a Future Made in Australia is about rebuilding the industrial base of our country. That's a big thing. It's a generational project; it's not going to happen this year or in five years. The fruits of this labour will be seen in the coming 10 or 20 years and beyond as we rebuild industries and bring back jobs that have been lost overseas. The record of this mob over there: about a decade ago they stood up at the dispatch box and dared car industry to leave Australia. They chased them out of our country and then cheered them on as they left. Well, we have a different view.

But the world has also changed. It's really important that we understand the context for the Future Made in Australia legislation and investments. We learned some lessons from COVID about supply-chain resilience, that the just-in-time economy—which pure economists, perhaps over the neoliberal era, an era of unchallenged globalisation, would say made sense in textbooks, in order to maximise your wealth—carries enormous risks when it's disrupted, as it was during the pandemic. We couldn't make medical equipment here. We found how vulnerable we were with pharmaceuticals. If you want to have a look at strategic vulnerability, have a look at our fuel resilience in our industrial base—the geopolitical overlay of increasing uncertainty, with wars and conflicts breaking out around the world and the greatest risk of conflict in our region that we've seen for decades. But it is also about competition, because other countries are cottoning on to this, too. The concept of 'friendsuring' is out there, as we think about how we rebalance our reliance on vulnerable supply chains.

All these things set the context for the Future Made in Australia agenda. Manufacturing is actually still the largest single employment sector in my electorate in south-east Melbourne. I'm proud to represent and have part of the great south-east Melbourne industrial precinct in Bruce, shared with Isaacs and Holt. The members for Isaacs and Holt and I talk about this often, at the heart of that great nationally significant manufacturing precinct. And manufacturing jobs are good jobs. They're jobs that are increasingly high wage, high skill and high value.

I talked in my first speech about success in manufacturing being a bit like the story of agriculture in many senses over a hundred years or more. More investment in technology, more investment in skills and more investment in science and research, and knowledge capitalisation means higher productivity and higher wealth. There are not always more jobs but there are better jobs. There's no great argument with those facts.

But success in manufacturing in the years to come relies on skills, technology and cheap power. We'll need to reclaim the advantage we had through the 1960s and 1970s of cheap, ubiquitous energy. And renewable energy is the cheapest form of new power. The economics are clear. The government gets it, economists get it and industry gets it. Pretty much the only people left in the country that don't get it are those opposite. They hear the word 'renewables' and their little brains explode. I should issue a trigger warning before I talk about renewables.

The National Reconstruction Fund with its $15 billion of loans and equity investments to support new investments in priority sectors and a $392 million industry growth program both sit alongside the Future Made in Australia agenda, because we need to do more. The old neoliberal consensus that's dominated thinking around this stuff for the last few decades along with untrammelled globalisation just don't work anymore. The world has changed and we have to change too. Other developed nations have figured this out, and Australia must not get left behind. This is not new protectionism, as those opposite keep crying. It's not. It's not about putting walls up. It's about government being a partner in building the foundations to support new investment to come into those sectors that we need—to build new enterprises, new sectors and new firms.

Australians do understand change and we understand risk. We're a pragmatic people. We live on an island continent at the bottom of a region with 3½ billion or more people. The world doesn't owe us a living. We've got the most enormous opportunities, we're in the fastest growing region in human history. The world's economic centre has been moving from Europe towards Asia, right above us, faster than at any time in recorded human history. That rate of change is accelerating. Geopolitical competition is already expressing itself in conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and the risk of further, and our own region is the focus of this competition. The transition of billions of people from low and middle incomes to high-middle incomes and the transition from high emissions to low emissions—net zero emissions. We have the most to gain out of that transition of any OECD country because we've got the world's best renewable energy resources, if only we seize the opportunity and invest wisely in the industries that can take advantage of that and to partner with those industries.

I want to read a quote from the now Assistant Minister for Future Made in Australia, Senator Ayres—a very good friend of mine. He gave a beautiful speech to the Sydney Institute not long ago, talking about how he grew up on a farm in regional New South Wales, the failure of his family's farm—no shame in that—and his family's journey. Again, I should have issued a trigger warning because it punches the opposition's mythology that no Labor members have actually lived on farms or grown up on farms and that no Labor members have worked in businesses.

See they get triggered, don't they. They just like to spout the propaganda and paint their stereotypes. Anyway, I recommend Senator Ayres' speech to you. I might send you a copy. It's a very good speech.

I underscore the point. Our agenda is a long way from the lazy complacency that characterised your wasted decade under Abbott and Turnbull and Morrison. That wasted decade of decay and dysfunction and dithering and division. The fighting amongst yourselves. I could get out the Nemesis quotes, but time's short and I want to read that quote from Senator Ayres. He said:

As the Prime Minister said back in April, we need to aim high, be bold and build big to match the size of the opportunity in front of us. We have to get cracking. Australia has unlimited potential, but we do not have unlimited time. If we don't seize this moment, it will pass. If we don't take this chance, we won't get another. If we don't act to shape the future, the future will shape us.

That's exactly what the Future Made in Australia agenda is about—shaping the future and responding to the realities of the world, not the fantasy that we still live in the 1980s and can still run the same economic agenda, when the world has fundamentally changed. It's a very simple plan, in essence. We want Australia to be a country that makes more things here, because making more things here will grow our economy and create good jobs, spreading opportunity around the country, making the most of the natural resources and the advantages that we have—cheap, reliable renewable energy, a skilled workforce and an educated population—making more things here, making us more wealthy, more secure and more independent and building our resilience to future economic and strategic shocks. It's an economic plan for a better future.

Amidst of all this, what's the position of the opposition? I had the misfortune of being slightly wrongly advised by my office about the timing, so I ran in and had to endure two of the opposition's speeches—all that carping, nasty negativity that we've come to expect from the Leader of the Opposition. He's infecting them. Some of them are otherwise reasonable people. Actually, I had no idea who one of them was. I don't think I'd ever seen him before. Anyway, the other one seems liked quite a reasonable chap.

I'm glad you're all sitting down. You'd be shocked to know that the opposition, the alternative government of the country, are saying no to making more things in Australia, just like they said no to tax cuts and no to the National Reconstruction Fund. They voted no to energy rebates; that was a high point for them, wasn't it? They say fee-free TAFE, that skills agenda that underpins manufacturing, is 'a waste of money'—that's a direct quote. They attack CSIRO. They don't like science, facts or evidence. They said Australian manufacturing is 'a graveyard'—pretty insulting to the incredible number of local businesses and workers in my electorate, but those are their words.

They are saying no to the production tax credits at the moment. They say they're corporate welfare that might build new industries, like in critical and rare earth minerals, except when the opposition leader goes to Western Australia. Then they say: 'No, it doesn't mean no. It kind of means maybe, but we don't want to say that, because it kind of contradicts what we said. Maybe we mean yes, but we still say no.' They have no cost-of-living policies. You would have sat through question time. There were no questions on the cost of living. They have no policies on the cost of living. They've only got three policies. They're saying no to the Future Made in Australia policy, but they've only got three policies. I'll give them that; they do have three policies now.

They've got their policy for more expensive housing, through letting people raid and trash their retirement savings, superannuation, to push up the cost of housing. That's a genius idea—push up the cost of housing to make it more affordable. That's one of their policies. They've got their 'higher grocery prices' policy, where they'll split up Coles and Woolworths and Coles will buy some Woolies stores and Woolies will buy some Coles stores. That's their 'push up grocery prices' policy. Their third big one is their higher power prices and the risky nuclear reactors that are too expensive and too slow. That's their energy policy. Sometime in the 2040s they'll have a few nuclear reactors that'll cost goodness knows how many hundreds of billions. That's their energy policy.

There's no doubt, though, that the biggest threat to Australian jobs and investment is not the things I've outlined—not the changes in the global economy, not the supply chain disruption and not the international uncertainty. It's the Liberal-National coalition's 'no, no, no'. It's just more of Peter Dutton's nasty negativity. That's all they've got, and it's not a surprise. As I said, it has been a decade or so since they chased the car industry out of Australia. Now they want to sacrifice another generation of Australian jobs by saying no to the Future Made in Australia policy.

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