Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk about manufacturing in Holt. The electorate of Holt is well known for its proximity to the manufacturing heartland of Australia in the Dandenong region. Some 22 per cent of the workforce in my electorate is employed in manufacturing, which is the most of any federal electorate in the country. The manufacturing industry, we know, is facing immense challenges, amongst them being the Australian dollar at an all-time high, economic confidence abroad being continually battered and the mining boom, which continues to take skilled workers out of industries like manufacturing.

During my last adjournment debate, I flagged concern about how people dismissed the manufacturing sector, forgetting the proud history and tradition of Australian innovation and industrial practices, with comments like 'eventually all manufacturing will go offshore, right?' Even economic and media commentators are saying this. Imagine my surprise to hear on radio a well-respected economist like Ross Gittins, who contributed to this sentiment recently with comments he made ABC radio. During the interview he said, 'Australians don't make things well.'

I reflected on this and I reflected on companies around my area—Jayco Caravans, Volgren buses, Icon Plastics, Southport Engineering, Bombardier trains—companies with excellence in manufacturing equal to any in the world. I found it very difficult to reconcile that with the comment 'Australians don't make things well'. I would suggest to Mr Gittins that he actually pays a visit to the manufacturers in my electorate who have been doing Australia proud by manufacturing products sought right around the world and known for their quality and innovation. Comments like this really dismay me, and my constituents who are employed in manufacturing are equally offended by insinuations that their jobs are dirty, menial or somehow of less value to the economy than other jobs.

Mr Gittins also suggests in an interesting and, and as some might class it, patronising way that there are many lesser skilled jobs in the economy, suggesting perhaps that retrenched blue-collar workers including manufacturing workers pack up and move to construct new mines in the Pilbara and other mining regions. I guess my question to Mr Gittins is this: does he understand, as recently reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, that 70,000 people in the Dandenong region including many from Holt rely on manufacturing? Again, I ask him to have a word with the workers from Dandenong South, Hallam, Hampton Park, Endeavour Hills, Fountain Gate—some suburbs just out and around my area—to see how they feel about this. They have toiled away, in some cases their whole lives, making enormous sacrifices for their families, paying off the family home and sending their kids to school, university or TAFE. The kinds of comments that we have heard undermine the skills and determination required to manufacture goods, be it for a machine operator, a boilermaker or a laboratory technician. These people literally make the country that we live in here today, and to hear them being disparaged in this way really offends me.

Think about the suburb of Doveton: it was built around the great companies that shifted to Dandenong in the 1940s, fifties and sixties—the GMHs, the Nissans, the Heinzs, and Pilkington glass. These are the people that made the cars, that made the glass, that made our country the country that it is today. So to say to a group of people that live in Doveton with that proud tradition that they are less valuable than other people within the community is un-Australian, in my view.

Again, I would like to suggest to Mr Gittins that he takes a little trip down to Icon Plastics, where I have been recently. Icon Plastics is an Australian-owned and operated company with more than 40 years of experience in the design, the manufacture and the supply of plastic products for Australian and international markets. The company aims to be recognised as the best designers and manufacturers of extrusion profiles and injection moulded plastic products in Australia and throughout the world through innovation and best practice. These people have been doing so. The gentleman I met with at this company personifies Australian innovation and persistence of business smarts over cheap imported competition. In fact, they are exporting products to China. So next time Mr Gittins decides to talk about the future of Australia, the future of Australia still remains in manufacturing and I will not have workers that live in my electorate demeaned in that way on radio again.