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

Fusion, sorry. Thank you. I appreciate that. What if fusion takes off where fission hasn't and we're not even in the fission game? Every other country will have a massive advantage in getting into nuclear fusion because they are already in fission. I'm not enough of an expert to know whether fusion is going to be the future, but the concept of Australia keeping all of its options open for all the technologies that are out there is really important.

What this bill does is put all our eggs in one basket. It's very focused on green hydrogen and it's very focused on some other things. Like a lot of the government's investments, it's very ideologically narrowly focused. I worry that, if some of those things don't take off or if technology goes off in a way that we didn't predict, we are not going to be in the game globally. That's frightening for Australia and it's frightening for the people of the Goulburn Valley. If those businesses that I started out with in this address leave our shores, there'll be a lot of people in my electorate who won't have jobs anymore. If those people don't have jobs, they won't have money. Their living standards will go back even further than they have done. So we really have to focus on making sure we protect Australia's manufacturing future, and this bill is not it.

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