Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Future Made in Australia (Guarantee of Origin) Bill 2024. When I spoke on other bills in relation to this, such as the Future Made in Australia Bill, I began—I'd like to remind people of this—with a tour of the industrial part of Shepparton, the main city in the region that I have the great honour of representing, and I talked about driving around. If I could take people on a virtual tour, we'd be driving down Old Dookie Road and New Dookie Road, and we'd turn right and see Noumi, a brand-new manufacturing facility that takes a huge amount of milk from the dairy farmers in the immediate area, who work so hard to produce that milk and invest so much of their capital and are hoping to have enough irrigation water to be able to grow the feed for those cows. That milk comes into Noumi, and Noumi turns that into UHT products. A lot is for the domestic market, but a lot of it gets exported. It's a heat process that turns that milk into something that can be exported. I've been to China. I've been to a supermarket in Shanghai where I've seen that product on the shelf being sold for quite a large amount of money.

You can turn around then, and you'll see SPC, now called SPC Global, which is an iconic food manufacturer. Every time I talk about SPC in this place, I renew my invitation to everyone in this place: if you want some SPC peaches, they're in my office, so just go and help yourself, please. Member for Swan, you're also welcome to come and do the SPC taste challenge. You do a blind tasting of the SPC processed fruit and the Chinese import, and then you'll see how good made in Australia really tastes if we look after those industries.

See this speech in context