Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—The purpose of this statement is to:

The pulp and paper industry makes an important social, environmental and economic contribution to this country. It produces a diverse range of products essential to modern living including printing and communications papers, security paper, newsprint, tissues, cardboard boxes and other forms of packaging. In financial year 2010-11 it created close to $11 billion in product and around $1.1 billion of this was exported. It has a highly skilled workforce and provides around 18,000 jobs, many of which are located in regional parts of the country. The industry is also a significant producer of renewable energy and a major consumer of recycled products. It contributes to environmental outcomes by using sustainably managed forestry resources and adds value through the manufacture of those resources into high-quality products.

Pulp and Paper Industry Strategy Group report

In 2009, the government convened the Pulp and Paper Industry Strategy Group to undertake a strategic review of Australia's pulp and paper industry. I would like to thank the group for its valuable work, in particular its deputy chairs, Michael O'Connor, National Secretary of the CFMEU, and Jim Henneberry, CEO of Australian Paper—both of whom I am very familiar with.

The strategy group's report included recommendations on the themes of innovation, investment, sustainability and productivity. The whole-of-government response to that review, which can be accessed at my department's website, addresses each of these themes and maps a way forward for the industry. The government's response affirms our commitment to work with Australia's pulp and paper industry to continue to build on its strengths and undertake the investment and develop the skills required to secure the industry's long-term sustainability and prosperity.

Australia's pulp and paper industry, like many other manufacturing industries, faces many challenges and structural change pressures, and the government is considering these issues in its response to the report of the non-government members of the Prime Minister's Taskforce on Manufacturing.

The government recently announced the establishment of a manufacturing leaders group to help progress some of the key issues affecting Australia's manufacturing industry. I announce today that representatives from the pulp and paper industry will form an advisory group to support the work of the manufacturing leaders group. This advisory group, to be chaired by Michael O'Connor and Jim Henneberry, will play a key role in ensuring the concerns of the pulp and paper industry are heard and considered in the development of our manufacturing industries.

Investment

Continued investment in manufacturing facilities is absolutely vital to maintaining industry competitiveness and to capturing new opportunities. While recent news that Gunns Limited has been placed in receivership is disappointing, there are nevertheless a number of encouraging examples of the willingness of industry players to embrace the future, supported by recent government announcements. My colleague Minister Crean recently announced that the government will provide up to $28 million towards an $84 million project at Norkse Skog's Boyer Mill in Tasmania to convert a newsprint machine to make coated catalogue paper instead. This grant will complement a $13 million loan from the Tasmanian government and will help secure over 300 existing jobs at the mill following recent declines in newsprint consumption. That is a very important joint investment in Tasmania.

Norske Skog Australasia has also recently established a joint venture with clean energy company Licella to work on second generation bio-crude oil production. This is a great example of the potential for pulp and paper manufacturers to diversify their business models through active engagement in new clean technologies.

I recently announced that the Australian government will also provide $9.5 million towards a $90 million project to install a de-inking pulp facility at Australian Paper's Maryvale mill in Victoria. Construction of the project, which is expected to create 140 construction jobs, should begin late this year. This investment will support the jobs of nearly 900 workers directly employed there and over 4,000 other indirect jobs which rely on the mill's operations. This is a very important part of the outer Melbourne and La Trobe Valley region. The project will enable Australian Paper to recycle paper to produce pulp used in the manufacture of printing and communication paper with recycled fibre content, reducing the need for around 80,000 tonnes per year of waste paper to otherwise go to landfill—all of which contribute also to our greenhouse gas emissions. This measure will reduce emissions.

The government is also providing the regulatory and business environment required to support the scale of investment required by the industry to establish new plant and make innovations at existing plant. Amcor is commissioning a new $550 million recycled packaging paper mill at Botany near Sydney. In June 2011, Visy completed a major expansion of its Tumut mill in New South Wales bringing its total investment there to nearly $1 billion, and opened a $50 million clean energy plant at Coolaroo in Victoria. Kimberly-Clark Australia is currently investing over $30 million to install a gas turbine and heat recovery process at its Millicent tissue mill in South Australia. All of these investments highlight that Australia's pulp and paper industry remains resilient and able to adapt to changing market conditions. They also show that global pulp and paper companies are committed to ensuring their Australian based operations meet world-class standards, particularly in relation to water and energy efficiency.

Conclusion

I conclude this statement by reaffirming this government's commitment to continue working with the pulp and paper industry to ensure its long-term viability.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Indi to speak for not more than seven minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the House enable the member for Indi to speak for a period no longer than seven minutes.

Question agreed to.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the minister's statement. On behalf of the coalition, let me start by saying that there are some elements of the minister's remarks with which I agree, including his references to the significance of the pulp and paper industry in this country. This has long been a vitally important industry for Australia and for regional Australia and it needs to remain a vitally important industry long into the future. Of all our domestic industries, there are very few that have been subjected to the same intensity or combination of pressures as this one. But the minister's statement did not tell us anything that the industry and the public did not already know.

There were a number of elements in his statement with which I do not agree at all. If I was an employee of the forestry industry, with my job under a grave cloud, or one of the many thousands of former employees in the forestry industry who have recently lost their jobs then I would not be looking to this statement as representing any source of optimism or inspiration at all. I was waiting for something a bit more significant. But I think that I am right in saying that the only new announcement of any kind in that speech at all was that a new advisory group would be established to support another advisory group that was born from a taskforce that was created at a forum. If that is the case, that says pretty much everything about this government's lack of any fresh vision for Australian manufacturing, especially in relation to an industry under extraordinary and near unprecedented pressure. It also continues the near farcical charade of the Prime Minister's so-called manufacturing taskforce, which was just another excuse for more talk with no guarantee of or even prospect of any immediate or decisive action from Labor.

I recall what I interpreted as embarrassment on the minister's face at the press conference at which we heard that the conclusion of the task force made a clear statement that Australian manufactured mattered. Fancy that! The task force recommended commissioning an investigation of a sovereign wealth fund, committing to consulting with industry in the development of all regulation, initiating a dialogue on what it means to be 'downturn ready' and establishing an independent panel to advise on the changes needed to maximise the potential of design thinking. And it goes on and on along those lines. Needless to say, that task force was not even allowed to consider the impact of the Fair Work Act on manufacturing employment and it was not allowed to consider the impact of the carbon tax. You would think that they would have been allowed to consider the most significant government policies affecting inputs to the manufacturing sector, in which businesses are operating at very tight profit margins. But they were not allowed to consider them at all. Even then, they still pointed out that the carbon tax was a disaster and that the government's approach needed to be changed.

It was also confirmed this month by one of the task force members, the head of the CSIRO, that none of the task force members visited even so much as a single small- or medium-sized business in the manufacturing sector as part of their work. The government talking to real people out there in the real world of Australian manufacturing is not part of this government's approach to policy making.

Just for good measure—and in case there is still a single person left in the manufacturing sector who is not thoroughly sick of being misunderstood, ignored and patronised—it is also our understanding that yet another so-called industry and innovation statement underpinned by secretariat work and born out of a whole succession of interdepartmental meetings and discussions will be released by the government in mid-November. While all of this jawboning has been done over the course of the last five years, the government has presided over—or, more to the point, stood idly by while it happened—the loss of around 120,000 net jobs in Australian manufacturing. That is roughly one in every eight manufacturing jobs. From the time that the carbon tax was announced as policy in February 2011 to August 2012, around 33,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Australia. That equates to one job lost every 20 minutes.

Australian Paper, in their submission to the Victorian government's manufacturing inquiry, said that the pulp and paper industry is in crisis, with employment investment and exports all falling. It has not been a good time for the pulp and paper industry. There should have been a pulp mill built in Tasmania, but one has not been built. The Labor-Greens alliance has created uncertainty for the forestry industry, resulting in thousands of job losses. There should not have been years of delay in making the government's changes to the antidumping system, but there were, even after multiple submissions by the industry pointing to undue delays, costs and onerous administrative environments. In a highly competitive price sensitive environment, cost is everything. Companies like Australian Paper and Visy should not be subjected to an extremely damaging measure like the carbon tax. But they are. Australian Paper, I might add, is yet another one of the companies that has now received a new grant from the government in the past few months that only matches or partially matches the millions of dollars that they are losing thanks to the carbon tax.

Indeed, it was always the height of irony to see the climate change minister trying to take that hat off hastily and put the industry minister hat on. He is the chief architect of the carbon tax, and that role is utterly and hopelessly in conflict with his role as industry minister. His speech today was another one clearly pointing to that.

I want to use the opportunity of this ministerial response to draw attention once again to the sharp contrast between the government and the opposition when it comes to industry policy. We will start by abolishing the carbon tax. We have also announced our intention to change Australia's standards regime to ensure that imported products better comply with the same mandatory standards imposed on locally made goods. We have committed to reducing the costs of Commonwealth red tape to business by at least a billion dollars a year. We have announced a new coalition policy to adopt world's best practice in Australia's antidumping system. We will end government waste and reduce debt, which will take the pressure off interest rates and exert downward pressure on the dollar. And we will have a lot to say about these issues and other policies leading up to the next election.

Labor's approach is all about creating extra costs, taxes and regulations. They even try to throw money at problems to try and patch up the damage that their ad hoc policies have caused. Our approach is to reduce the harm to and the spiralling costs of making things in Australia. It is not enough to say nice words about how important the industry is. Supportive words undermined by damaging policy are a cruel hoax. (Time expired)