Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, and I'll state from the outset that I am opposed to this bill. I've been listening to the speeches, particularly on the other side, and sometimes I think I'm in a high school debating club where you can signal your virtue and talk about wonderful things. The previous speaker, the member for Tangney, talked about high-paid jobs. I'm just wondering how that works when you take an operator off a D10 bulldozer because you've closed down their mine and you give them a bottle of Windex and a soft cloth to wipe the dust off solar panels. How does that actually work?

We've heard other members blame the coalition for the Holdens and the rest of the car industry leaving Australia. Would they keep subsidising it? The reason that Ford and Holden left Australia is that they made a product that no-one wanted to buy. We didn't lose the Kingswoods and the Falcons; we lost a large family sedan that was too low slung to go on a country road and too big for the city. A lot of people come to me and complain about the loss of Holden and Ford. When you ask them what they're driving, they say, 'Oh, it's a Hilux,' or something. So the Australian people made the decision about Holden and Ford leaving Australia. Following on from the speeches from the Labor Party, we would probably continue to be subsidising them to make something that they don't really want.

The previous member spoke about universities and getting the skills to undertake this new industry that we're going to have in our renewable powerhouse. I'm not sure what university course teaches you how to use a pop riveter, but that's the sort of skill you would need in a factory bolting together solar panels. I'm wondering where this workforce is going to come from. One of the reasons that manufacturing has moved offshore is the scarcity of labour. The industrial relations laws in this country have made it incredibly difficult. With the implementation of the IR agenda of this government now, small business has a huge disincentive to actually increase, because, once they get to 15 employees, they've got to have an on-site union organiser and open access to total strangers carrying the union card to influence their businesses.

The member for Reid made a very thoughtful contribution about the wonderful businesses that she's proud of in her electorate, and that's great, but they were done without this policy. That's the point. A lot of the Labor Party have shot themselves in the foot as they are spruiking how innovative their electorates are without this policy, so I'm not quite sure how that would go.

There are advantages—or disadvantages—to being in here for a long time. I was here when the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government came in. The day that they announced their climate change policy, Kandos, which was then in my electorate—it's not now; it's in Calare—closed the cement plant. So these innovative renewable projects that we're going to produce here are going to be stuck in the ground with cement that comes on a ship from Asia because the policies we put in place here have made it impossible to be competitive.

Here is a history lesson, folks: there are two things that made this country as great as it is. They are our ability to produce more food than we need and our ability to have cheap energy. I represent people that work in both of those sectors, and they are under constant attack day after day after day just to keep doing the things they do to keep this country viable. We have green protesters gluing themselves to the railway line at Newcastle because they are opposed to coal exports. At the same time, my grain and cotton producers can't get their trains to port. They miss the shipping deadline, causing enormous harm. What's worse, the ANZ bank have removed their funding for the Port of Newcastle to show their virtue to their customers and shareholders. It's the biggest exporting terminal that services my electorate, with potential to go into containers and other things. The disconnect we are seeing between people showing their virtue and what's practically possible here is actually mind-blowing.

Day after day after day, we talk about being a renewable energy powerhouse. Who in here knows that, for 43 minutes of every day, all the electricity generated in Japan comes from Narrabri? Who knows that? Do you know why? It's because it's low in sulphur and it's low in ash. Through the Healy power stations they're getting emissions similar to gas. But we're going to close that down.

We're talking here about lifting Indigenous people out of poverty. Who here knows that 250 Aboriginal people work in that mine at Narrabri and are earning $120,000 or $140,000 a year operating equipment there? They're going to rip that up. Who here knows that the Murray-Darling Basin, the food and fibre bowl of this country, now is under constant attack to remove our productivity so people elsewhere can feel good about themselves because they're protecting the environment? What's the biggest employer of Aboriginal people in my electorate after mining? It's water. So we're taking those jobs out. We'll be buying fruit from China, where there are none of the conditions that we have here. So this virtue signalling without any practical understanding of what it means is a huge issue for us here.

The actual powerhouse of our economy is not big business. It's smaller, innovative business. We've seen a few big corporate flyers circulating the halls of parliament with their hi-vis names on their vests, talking about hydrogen and things like that. Well, they're backing off that a bit now, aren't they? Where are the innovative small businesses?

A few months ago I was at the Ahrens factory in Gilgandra. They're producing grain silos. There's a lot of talk here about resilience. There is nothing that's going to make the ag sector more resilient than the ability to store grain and sell it when the market suits or store it as fodder for drought. The previous government had, in one year, 100 per cent instant asset write-off for preparation, for grain storage, for water and for infrastructure. There was an absolute boom in manufacturing in regional areas. The Ahrens factory at Gilgandra employs a large number of Indigenous people in highly paid, highly skilled jobs, but they say, 'No, we do away with that policy.' The instant asset write-off meant that farmers could purchase planters made in the member for New England's electorate, up at BOSS Engineering—a magnificent Australian success story. They are the absolute Rolls Royce of farm machinery. They could buy a planter and get that off their tax in one year, but, no, not now.

So we talk about ways of reducing our emissions. Inland Rail: one train from Melbourne to Brisbane takes 150 trucks off the road. How much is that saving on our carbon emissions? These factories that we're going to have in our capital cities will be producing all this stuff that's going to be shunted all over the place, so wouldn't it be good if we had an efficient, low-energy way of transporting that around, like Inland Rail? Wouldn't it be really good to have that? 'No, no, no. We're going to put a hold on that for God only knows how long.' God help you if you want to take a photo next to Inland Rail. Next thing you know the Senate is trying to pin you for trespassing. That's the level we've gotten to in this place.

Martinus, an Australian company, have developed this track-laying machine that can do a couple of kilometres of track a day. Where is it now? It is sitting collecting dust somewhere because that project has come to a halt. So how about in this country we stick to our knitting? How about we back those that know what they're doing and are doing a good job?

We don't subsidise something that we feel is philosophically important. That's the divide in this place now. Are the children of the members from the leafy suburbs or the teal seats going to go and bolt solar panels together, or is it their aspiration to say, 'We've saved the environment because we've subsidised a factory somewhere out in the suburbs where we don't have to look at it, but we really feel good about what we're doing for the environment'?

This is a classic example of where Labor just don't get it. My home town used to be a Labor town, with council workers, shearers, railway workers, timber workers and coalminers. All those people have left Labor. We've got copper and we've got gold. You don't think a bit of gold, silver, silicon or glass gets used in some of these solar panels? How are we going to make these things if we don't have the mines to mine them? Where's the energy going to come from to drive these factories? We're producing solar panels to generate energy so we can produce more solar panels, but where's the net gain to the country? What about the 20 million people outside Australia who rely on us to feed them? What's going to happen to them? We've got vegetation laws that are coming in because apparently growing crops is unseemly. The attack on our cattle is next. We've already seen the sheep industry devastated. Like those over there, I am very proud of my electorate for their innovation, their hard work and what they do. Why is it that they have to fight every day for their very existence?

So while all this sounds really good—and there was a bit of talk in Dubbo earlier this year about the hydrogen that's going to be produced there by a ship that comes around from Western Australia into Port Kembla and pumps it into the system and produces hydrogen in Dubbo. I'm not sure that I'm going to see that. Why don't we just back what Dubbo does well? The previous government put $10 million into the Bourke Shire Council to put in the infrastructure for a small animals abattoir. My goodness, fancy doing that! Guess what? In Bourke—they're probably about 70 or 80 per cent Indigenous—there are 150 jobs that weren't there five years ago. We're actually supplying food, and that's largely going to Muslim communities all over the world because of their fondness for goatmeat. That is a practical government investment that employs people, provides something that's actually needed and is not virtue signalling so that we can say at the next election: 'We're cooling the climate. We're going to build solar panels in Australia at three times the cost of China and hope someone wants to buy them.' I oppose this bill and I certainly hope that those in the Senate decide to do the same.

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