Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Future Made in Australia Bill. I did listen carefully to the member for Hunter over there. He's a good bloke. He is a good bloke and we should try to work together. We do work together a lot in this place. I think the general public wouldn't understand how much we work together. They see the contest and us getting stuck into each other and they think that's all that happens here, but in the vast majority of work we do, we work together. I'm on a committee with the member for Hunter, and we work together well but, sorry mate.

I rise to speak on this bill, and to speak in opposition of this bill and the policy in general. It does come with a fantastic name—I'll give it that. You'd fall in love with the name very easily—the Future Made in Australia Bill—and I think that's what the Labor Party marketing people had in mind when they concocted it, but it's unfortunate that it doesn't actually correlate with the content of the bill. It is a bill that is designed to expand the role of the Export Finance Australia and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, and establish a National Interest Framework that retrospectively underpins the government's Future Made in Australia policy. That sounds wonderful. I had a good read of the explanatory memorandum, and some of the bill, and I can say that I totally disagree with the premise here—that is that we're going to be creating manufacturing jobs by subsidising businesses that are not profitable or viable in the hope that one day they will be. In that explanatory memorandum there were a few things that jumped out at me. One of them was the phrase 'the green premium'—that's the extra money you have to pay for some of these technologies that can't be produced at the same price as with conventional methods now. I don't remember the green premium being mentioned before the last election by the Prime Minister. I suspect that the Australian punter, when they find out what the green premium is, will run away from it very quickly because if they think the cost-of-living crisis that they're in now is bad, it's going nowhere with your green premium. It's around to stay, and we will all be paying extra for this absolute fantasy that the Labor Party is involving Australians in with their extraordinarily damaging rush to 70 per cent renewables by 2030. It's really quite frightening.

We already manufacture a lot of good things in Australia, including in my electorate of Wide Bay. Indeed, under the regional growth fund the coalition had we supported business. We put out an expression of interest call for all businesses and all ideas that might be viable and create jobs in the regions to come forward and put their business case in and show us how they could develop with a bit of support and be viable straightaway. One of the great success stories was Rheinmetall NIOA which is now making high-tech 150 millimetre munitions shells that are being purchased all around the world. They've created a hundred jobs in Maryborough. That's what you need to do. You need to look at things and apply general, normal, competent economic standards and say, 'That's a winner and that's going to create jobs so let's invest in it.'

What this policy does is pick the winners based on an ideology, and on big government and on government telling businesses what they need to make, even though they are unviable, and subsidising it with taxpayers' money to the tune of something like $22 billion. This policy is going to effectively waste $22 billion in an international market where we trade with other economies. This is just pie in the sky. It is complete and utter pie in the sky.

What adds insult to injury is that this is happening in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, when people are finding it difficult to pay their general bills. They've really got to think about how they're going to put those dollars together to afford to send the kids on an excursion or even to let the kids have food from the tuckshop a couple of times a week if that's what they want. They really have to think about it. The government is not focused on fixing those problems; they're focused on this ideological mission that is going to harm us.

The idea that our current inflation crisis, which is seeing us at the very back of the G10 nations in terms of recovering from anything that could be blamed on COVID, is quite extraordinary. It's homegrown. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank has clearly articulated this is a spending problem and it is homegrown. You can only blame Vladimir Putin for so long. Under Labor we've seen extraordinary increases in prices for families and for businesses.

People are paying more income tax. The level of income tax is up by 20 per cent. Real wages for employees have actually collapsed in this time, while Labor's policies have forced prices up. It really is the stuff of nightmares.

This government is so taken up by its ideological mission to decarbonise Australia with 58 million solar panels and thousands and thousands of wind turbines that they've forgotten the job at hand, which is actually getting the settings right so Australian families can afford to live. They can spruik on as much as they like about subsidising high electricity prices, but you've got to create the fundamentals, create the environment, where those prices aren't high, and that's what they are not doing. They're having the opposite effect. Their policies are driving prices up; electricity prices are up by 20 per cent. The government are completely and utterly neglecting the primary job of a government, which is looking after Australians.

The other element to this is, what could we do to help businesses? What could we do without this interventionist, big government approach that the Albanese government has taken on? The first thing we could do would be to work on bringing electricity prices down, not subsidising them. We need to work on bringing them down because it's not only families but also businesses that are paying some of the highest electricity prices in Australia, and that is a big disincentive for people setting up in Australia.

One thing we have traditionally benefited from in Australia has been cheap and consistent electricity. Well, that's what we need. That needs to be the first order of priority, not decarbonising. We need to look at how we can extend the life of our coal-fired power, how we can get more gas into the system and use those traditional methods of providing electricity to industry and families to make sure that we're strong up until the time when we transition to a reliable emissions-free nuclear, if emissions-free is what the people want.

If we don't get these settings right, if we don't get it so as we can provide the confidence and cheap electricity for business, we're going to see more foreclosures. We're going to see insolvencies continue at a rate that we already have. Since Labor came to power, 19,000 businesses have become insolvent. That's the highest number since ASIC began collecting data. This tells a story. We've got an inflation crisis that is caused by government spending. This bill seeks to spend more money. This inflation crisis is hurting Australians, with the cost-of-living crisis and with interest rates and the cost of living generally going up, and this government is not addressing that. It is ideological madness to continue going down this path that will hurt Australians.

Getting back to the point that my friend the member for Hunter made about cooperation, this bill has not been criticised by only the coalition. This isn't just the coalition coming in and trying to take the bill apart. People in industry, government officials and bureaucrats from Treasury have warned against this. The Productivity Commission also has not only criticised the program but has warned that some of the already announced programs, such as those that deal with making solar panels and the PsiQuantum project announced by the government, should be subject to a stricter national interest test.

How this national interest test or this framework will actually apply is a little bit vague, really, and that brings me to the next point against this bill, which is that this is just an absolute opportunity for pork-barrelling and an abuse of public funds by a minister. These very vague terms give a minister the opportunity to write a cheque for up to nearly $4 billion in an election term where they want, when they want and how they want. That's not good. I heard the member for Indi, who sits on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Anti-Corruption Commission with me and the member for Menzies, highlight some concerns about that and about the way that will be applied, and I share her concerns. This is not a policy that withstands rigorous scrutiny at all.

What we need to do is ensure that we are bringing inflation down. We need to stop the mindless overspending of taxpayers' money—that's what we need to do first. We can do that by knocking on the head the absolutely mad policies, like providing tax credits—billions of dollars—to billionaires. That would be a good starting point. We also need to stop the red and green tape and the overregulation that this Albanese government has inflicted upon business, so that business can get about doing what they do rather than having to comply with all sorts of crazy environmental and bureaucratic red tape. We need to invest in and encourage our gas and mineral industries, which have been great industries in helping to build our nation. We need to fix the industrial relations system that the Labor Party have inflicted upon business. We heard the member who spoke before me speak about the ability of the CFMEU to come into workplaces around the country on demand, for no reason, even if there are no members. They're the sorts of things we need to fix. We need to give small businesses—the 2.5 million small businesses—a clear definition of what a casual worker is. That'd be a great start.

This bill fails at every level. This bill is big government, it is about subsidising industries that are not viable, and it's a complete and utter waste of taxpayers' money.

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