Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges the role that Australian manufacturing businesses continue to play in ensuring our nation has vital supplies, including food and personal protective equipment, especially during the pandemic when global supply chains were disrupted;

(2) recognises that a vibrant manufacturing sector is important for our economic security; and

(3) congratulates Australian manufacturing businesses on their ongoing efforts to adapt to the current circumstances, keep people in jobs, support local supply chains and contribute to our national economic recovery.

To back Australian manufacturing, we must leverage the strengths that give our industries a competitive advantage. The new era of Australian manufacturing will focus on Australia's strength, where we compete on quality and value not just price. The Morrison government's $1.5 billion modern manufacturing strategy will evolve with industry to maximise our opportunities by leveraging our advantages and generating a national manufacturing industry that will create and sustain jobs. I'm so pleased that this industry will, I believe, have a heart in Western Sydney. That's why this strategy will target national manufacturing priorities, where we can exercise our advantages, take hold of emerging opportunities and address strategic interests, particularly in advanced manufacturing.

Australia does recognise these advantages and the quality and value of Australian manufacturing. Recent data shows that over 95 per cent of Australians associate the iconic Australian Made logo, the golden kangaroo, with high-quality products and local jobs. I launched my petition to back Australian manufacturing to harness this groundswell of community support alongside my advancing manufacturing task force in Western Sydney, collaborating with leaders in industry and education to address the barriers facing local manufacturers and to explore opportunities to unlock their potential and create more local jobs—pragmatic ways to get advanced manufacturing off the ground in Western Sydney.

The demand for Australian made has never been stronger. The modern manufacturing strategy is about making sure we take advantage of this opportunity to build a strong, resilient, thriving and internationally competitive manufacturing industry.

Western Sydney can be at the forefront of this new era of Australian manufacturing. We have the existing networks of established manufacturers and the investment to support emerging industries and start-ups. In Lindsay we have over 600 manufacturers. I've been meeting and speaking with many of them on an ongoing basis. Some of them are: Grant Engineered, Pluspec, SpanSet, Custom Denning, J Sinclair Engineering, GPC Electronics—doing wonderful things in our community at the forefront of manufacturing in the future. I'm so proud that this government is backing these local manufacturers.

Throughout this pandemic, they have been resilient, they've been adaptable and they've been determined to stay in a position where they can respond on the other side. Many manufacturers proved their adaptability to the conditions and jumped at the opportunity to produce critical supplies of personal protective equipment, or PPE, to combat the pandemic. They wanted to go above and beyond, and do something for our community.

Australian manufacturers have created hundreds of millions of protective masks, almost 450 million, at our domestic manufacturing production capacity in 2020 alone. Textiles and clothing companies have converted their outputs to produce thousands of surgical gowns and engineering firms have been making bottles for hand sanitiser.

Based in Western Sydney, Australian manufacturer ResMed has delivered more than 5,500 ventilators and contracted a group of Australian manufacturers and engineers to make 2,000 invasive ventilators here in Australia with over 99 per cent of the components Australian made. The growth in this sector has been aided by the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre register which helps businesses, hospitals, GPs and community groups to find suppliers of critical products in response to the coronavirus. By increasing access to potential customers and equipping our response to the coronavirus, it shows how the Morrison government's strategy to support businesses to get on with what they do best will create more jobs and strengthen our national resistance.

As we emerge from coronavirus, there can be no economic recovery without a jobs recovery. Australian manufacturing will play such a key role in creating more local jobs. We're investing in this new era in Australian manufacturing to bolster our own national resilience to future shocks in global supply chains. We're investing over $107 million in the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative and we know that manufacturers have the potential to strengthen the resilience of our national economy and to create jobs. Our economic plan will make it happen. The hardworking aspirational manufacturers in Lindsay and across Australia can know the Morrison government is backing them with the policies and support they need to be more competitive, to scale up, to expand, to thrive and to create more jobs.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Angie Bell (Moncrieff, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to support this motion, because I am a firm believer in Australian manufacturing. In my electorate of Paterson we're leading the way in ensuring our nation has vital supplies during this pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic I was contacted by Greg Whiteley, chairman of Whiteley Corporation. Whiteley is a global leader in infection prevention, being one of the largest manufacturers of sanitation products in our country. During this pandemic they have focused on preventing the spread of COVID-19 by manufacturing far beyond standard production levels, shoring up the supply of infection prevention products across industry and government. In layperson's speak, they have kept our hospitals clean and helped many individuals keep their hands clean as well. Whiteley have been supplying our health service and many local industries to ensure that surface disinfectant and sterilant products are available to meet increased hygiene measures that COVID-19 has warranted.

Many in my community have been concerned about the risk of transmission via contaminated surfaces, and we know from the research that the virus can survive anywhere from one to five days depending on the surface material. Thorough surface cleaning and disinfectant have been able to ensure that many potentially contaminated surfaces are left clean and hygienic, ultimately reducing the spread of COVID. Whiteley has conducted a vast number of disinfectant tests against a wide array of contaminated surfaces, making sure they're left clean and hygienic, and ultimately reducing the spread of COVID-19. Whiteley has, over the last 25 years, ensured public safety is at the heart of everything that it does. Whiteley has also assisted our region with its commitment to collaborative research programs, recently announcing a collaboration with the University of Newcastle in developing advanced manufacturing for med-tech in our region, the beautiful Hunter. The project will research advanced manufacturing technology to increase local production capacity, particularly during times of great need, which we've all witnessed in the past 11 months.

Not only is Whiteley a great local success story; they're, indeed, an industry leader in innovation and global infection prevention. I want to commend Dr Greg Whiteley and his team on the work they've have done to keep my community and our country safe. Without Whiteley, many of the major hospitals across Australia would not have been sterilised adequately to cope with this pandemic. That is something we can be incredibly proud of coming out of the Hunter region. In the Hunter, we are proud manufacturers and we want to see this government understand our needs and invest in manufacturing, not neglect it.

Ampcontrol is another leader in local manufacturing. It is a fantastic success story. It was born out of an electrical company that serviced the coal industry. Earlier this year, a team of Hunter engineers and health professionals, led by Ampcontrol, won a state government contract to build emergency ventilators that would ensure hospitals across our state would have the equipment to meet the worst possible outcomes, should the virus spread. When CEO, Rod Henderson, received the call to arms, he and his fantastic team wasted no time in developing an emergency ventilator. The prototype was ready quickly for clinical testing and to be rapidly manufactured as necessary. Rod received a call from state government representatives in March this year. When asked if he could manufacture a ventilator prototype that could be rapidly scaled up to as many as 600 units if needed, he said he took a deep breath and replied, 'Yes; we'll give it a crack.' Well, Rod, you have certainly given it more than a crack with your team. If that doesn't sum up the Australian mantra of looking after your neighbours and having a go, I really don't know what does. I get goosebumps as I think about Rod and his team and how they truly stepped up at Ampcontrol when we needed them most. The project commenced with 20 Ampcontrol engineers, biomedical and clinical specialists from the John Hunter Hospital, and Newcastle University's Faculty of Engineering, and they have done a brilliant job. Examples like this remind us that governments must acknowledge not only the role manufacturing plays in this pandemic but the role it plays in driving our nation forward.

Angie Bell (Moncrieff, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, this government does agree with the role that manufacturing plays in the COVID recovery. When I discuss with constituents of Moncrieff the new era of manufacturing, they are very supportive of improving Australia's manufacturing capabilities. It's also clear that Australians support a bright future for local manufacturing. In fact, nine out of 10 Australians believe that Australia should produce more products locally. Of course, achieving this will require effort and a sustained commitment to that bright future. I'm speaking about the government's $1.5 billion Modern Manufacturing Strategy for the new era of manufacturing in this country. I believe in it for the Gold Coast. There are already 14,000 jobs on the Gold Coast directly attributed to manufacturing and the industry is already worth $7 billion on the Gold Coast: So there is bright future for my electorate of Moncrieff when it comes to the manufacturing sector. There are many reasons that a vibrant manufacturing industry is good for Australia, but the main one is, of course, jobs, and that's what we're here for: to create jobs for Australians, including those in my electorate of Moncrieff.

From my family history and growing up in South Australia, I know about the importance of manufacturing jobs. It was a Liberal and Country Premier, Sir Thomas Playford, who set up Elizabeth as a manufacturing hub. I see the member for Boothby is in the chamber. She would agree with me that he also set up the Electricity Trust of South Australia and the South Australian Housing Trust to ensure that factory workers could afford to live in low-cost housing.

My parents, my grandparents and my brothers were all recipients of social housing and of those manufacturing jobs at the Elizabeth and Woodville plants of General Motors. My parents had great opportunities, my mother working at Levi Strauss, and created opportunities for my family and indeed for me to then move on. My parents saved up for their very modest first home and then of course extended opportunities for their children—and, of course, me here today as the member for Moncrieff. It all comes back to Premier Playford setting up manufacturing in South Australia.

But, of course, manufacturing jobs won't be the same as they were for my family growing up. They will be the new incarnation of manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs are changing, not just because of a changing world but also because of the opportunities. Right now we are all acutely aware of the importance of manufacturing for our sovereign capabilities, for defence and for medical supplies in our country, building up capabilities that are vital now and to build resilience for our future.

The changes I speak of today are broader changes to all types of manufacturing in Australia. Manufacturers are already making those changes. The changes are happening at home in Moncrieff. A great example is Patterson Glass in Nerang, in the western part of my electorate. Like so many businesses around Australia, they were reaping the benefits before COVID hit. But, along with 10,400 businesses in Moncrieff, they needed JobKeeper to keep going, to keep their staff employed and, importantly, to keep their business primed and ready to now recover. The confidence gained in keeping the team together is at the heart of the JobKeeper success in Nerang, in Moncrieff, in the great state of Queensland and indeed across our great country.

Patterson Glass are now back on track. The managing director, Marc Wheway, is the kind of business leader that would have kept the business going regardless—he is a great leader—but he knows, as does the Treasurer and the Prime Minister, and as I know as his local member, that we want more than just survival for Australians; we want Australians to thrive. JobKeeper has not only helped survival; it has primed business to bounce back with the speed that would not otherwise have been possible. Patterson Glass previously received a manufacturing modernisation grant to help with their output and to help put on more employees in their business—to increase capacity so that they can have better outputs and put on more employees. The sort of automation that they implemented with their modern manufacturing grant has created those extra jobs, and there are many other things that Patterson Glass are doing.

Whilst those on the other side of the House pine for the good old days, as the daughter, the granddaughter and a sister of factory workers, I want to see results in the manufacturing sector. It is not good enough to provide sentiment and nostalgia, and it's not good enough to throw away money wildly out the door with no plan. We have a plan. (Time expired)

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome a focus on manufacturing with this motion—belatedly, seven years into this government, it is great to have them talking about it. COVID has certainly been a threat for some businesses and an opportunity for others. Macquarie is home to about 550 manufacturing businesses—everything from biscuits and lavosh, to caravans, windows and glasshouses and the major packaging company WestRock. We have a large number of small manufacturers with up to five employees and family businesses, often where it isn't unusual to find a husband and wife or a parent and child partnership in action, through to the medium-size businesses that, despite growth, remain very firmly in a family's hands. I want to talk about a couple of these businesses—the people who make stuff—and the commitment they had to their staff when COVID hit, how much they needed support and how they have pivoted.

Frank and Olga have the Teardrop Camper Company. They make fantastic campervans with very comfortable inner spaces to sleep in—much more upmarket than a tent. Frank took a punt in his South Windsor factory. He built seven of them at the start of COVID. That punt has paid off. He is getting orders sight unseen from all over the country to support people in their desire to travel. For him, it was a decision and a gamble to upgrade, and it has paid off.

I'm also fortunate to have several gin distilleries in the electorate. At the request of the government, the Wild Hibiscus Flower Company converted its Gingle Bells Gin distillery to produce medical-grade hand sanitiser. In normal times, their gin's infused with botanicals, but for COVID it was the sanitiser that was infused with lemon myrtle—one of the most pleasant sanitisers to use—and there's a steady supply in my office. So they really stepped up, and, equally, I hope the community supports them now by making sure you've got the wild hibiscus to go into your champagne.

Another distillery, the already award-winning Karu gin distillery in Grose Vale, manufactured hand sanitiser and donated it to essential services, including police and food services, way back in March. It was established in 2017 by young husband and wife team Nick and Ally, who wanted to do something to help. They produced 100 litres, working with the tax office and an analytics company to get it quickly out the door. Speaking to Nick on the weekend at their cellar door, they're on the way to being not only a maker but a tourist destination.

During COVID, I also talked to Karen and Ben Lebsanft from Kurrajong Kitchen. They're the makers of award-winning lavosh which are stocked in major supermarkets right around the country. When I talk to them, it reminds me of how my dad used to talk about the staff who worked with us in our shop when I was growing up. Karen and Ben value their staff. In the early days of COVID, their aim was just to keep their staff on and to keep people employed. They were thrilled more recently to be awarded a federal Manufacturing Modernisation Fund grant. That's allowing them to upgrade their production so they can be more competitive overseas. Theirs is a growing manufacturing business, and it's already employing two generations. They started in 1993 and have been absolutely determined to keep food manufacturing in Australia.

COVID has certainly reinforced for all of us how important it is to have control of production on our own soil. I think that's probably what disappoints me about what the government brought out in its budget this year. It was touted as a major boon for Australian manufacturing, but the six priority areas identified were the same ones identified by Labor in 2012 and adopted in 2013. If the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments had stuck to those key manufacturing areas, rather than getting rid of the plan in 2014, manufacturing in this country would already have more thriving businesses employing thousands of people. We might still have a car-manufacturing industry, if the coalition actually cared about keeping manufacturing jobs onshore.

I hear them talking a lot about manufacturing, and I welcome that, but even today I'm not hearing specifics. What we learnt from the industry minister recently is that only $40 million of the $1.5 billion commitment the government has made will be spent this financial year. That's less than three per cent that will be spent between now and June next year, at the height of a recession. We see the same pattern in another announcement in the budget, the claim of $2 billion in new spending for the R&D tax incentive. In actual fact, the government's simply restoring the $1.8 billion it had planned to cut. Yet again, sadly, what we're seeing are words but no action, and manufacturing in this country deserves more.

Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This year we have been reminded of the critical importance of Australian manufacturing. With the disruption of global travel routes and supply chains, access to vital medical equipment and personal protective equipment for our frontline health professionals was threatened. In response, Australian manufacturers, including fantastic South Australian companies like Detmold, rose to the challenge. Our domestic manufacturing capacity for surgical masks has surged from just two million a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, with 61.9 million surgical masks being made in the month of September alone. This pandemic has clearly highlighted that the demand for quality Australian made products is stronger than ever.

Australia's manufacturing sector is a vibrant part of our economy and a vital component of our economic recovery plan. It is key to almost every supply chain and adds value across all sectors. This is why the Morrison government is backing our manufacturers with the $1.5 billion Modern Manufacturing Strategy. The strategy is a key feature of our government's JobMaker plan and will harness Australian manufacturing capability to drive our economy recovery and future resilience. This is very welcome news to the 481 manufacturing businesses in my electorate of Boothby, who employ over 3,600 South Australians.

Boothby has a strong history of manufacturing, especially in the suburb of Tonsley. Tonsley was once home to Australia's Mitsubishi production plant, and since its closure in 2008 the district has been reborn with the establishment of the Tonsley Innovation Precinct, focusing on high-tech and advanced manufacturing. I am a regular visitor to Tonsley, which is also home to Flinders University and one of our best TAFEs in South Australia, to view the exciting work of many of the local manufacturing success stories in the area.

Micro-X is one such business. They design, develop and manufacture innovative lightweight X-ray imaging systems right here in Tonsley in South Australia. Led by managing director Peter Rowland, Micro-X focus their efforts on mobile X-ray technology. Micro-X currently have two X-ray units in production, the Nano and the Rover. These products are fully integrated digital mobile X-ray units, with the Nano to operate in the public health-care space and the Rover for use in military hospitals.

In addition, Micro-X is continuously developing and leveraging their X-ray technology for further uses, with a number of projects in development for both commercial and defence purposes. One product in particular which is very exciting is their brain imagining CT scanner for stroke diagnosis, which is small enough to use within an ambulance. The scanner will be able to play a vital role in point-of-care diagnosis, providing paramedics the ability to scan a patient on site and to determine whether the stroke is from a blood clot or a bleed. Such diagnosis is pivotal within the first hour, the so-called golden hour, of a stroke, when the chances of survival and mitigating long-term brain damage are at their highest. I look forward to having one here when the technology is further developed and rolled out. This technology is currently being trialled in collaboration with RMIT University in Melbourne through the mobile stroke unit project. It has far-reaching potential for diagnosis and treatment of other traumatic brain injuries. The scanner is set to be a game changer for paramedics in the treatment of stroke patients, which could be used by first responders around the world.

A short walk from Micro-X is SAGE Automation. They are at the forefront of automated technologies that integrate seamlessly with communities. In August I toured SAGE's Tonsley facility with Damien Hewitt, the general manager for transport and smart cities at the company. At the site I was able to test out their Matilda smart transit hub system. Using a combination of smart technologies, Matilda addresses the last-mile problem for urban transport. The last-mile problem is the issue of moving people from a transport hub to their preferred destination. Matilda runs on a solar battery and assists commuters by connecting them with real-time public transport arrivals, nearby ride shares and bicycle hire stations. Earlier this year SAGE also received a federal government grant of almost $200,000 from the Road Safety Innovation Fund to investigate the deployment and evaluation of smart school zone systems. This is going to keep everyone using our school systems much safer.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to stand and talk about manufacturing because it's an incredibly important area, particularly given the changes in manufacturing that we have seen across the world in the last 10 to 15 or even 20 years. When globalisation really picked up people moved factories offshore, but now what we are seeing around the world is expertise in particular areas and the fragmentation of the supply chain and places elsewhere in the world focusing on small parts of the supply chain and becoming regional experts in that. Yet what we have got in Australia is a manufacturing policy—even now that the government has announced a new one—that is really decades behind where it should be. We have seen a government that abolished Labor's manufacturing plan back in 2014 and has replaced it with a smaller version now, some seven years later. We have had a government that essentially bullied Holden to leave the country at the very time when the supply chains for car manufacturing were fragmenting in such a way that we were actually in a very, very good place. Also, the dollar was high at the time. We had manufacturing at that time under pressure because of the high dollar and we lost viable companies because of that. Now, seven years late, we've got the member for Lindsay standing here and moving a very important motion and saying, 'We're in a new era of manufacturing.' Well, the world has been in a new era for a long time, and it's really too little, too late. I want to focus on that for the moment.

We have a government that's announced a $1.5 billion advanced manufacturing plan—sounds great. We've got a crisis at the moment. We need jobs. We need stimulus, and they've come in with manufacturing too late but good. But then you look at the detail—with this government you always have to look at the detail. It might be $1.5 billion over four years, but this financial year, when the crisis is here right now, it's $40 million—$79 million in budget for this year, underspend $40 million. That's it for manufacturing in Australia. 'New era,' says the member for Lindsay—$40 million this financial year. That $1.5 billion is spread out over four years and $800 million of it is going to the grants program for an estimated, according to the minister, 10 companies. So the great new era of manufacturing spends $40 million this financial year when we have a crisis that is seeing manufacturers shut their doors, and $800 million to 10 companies over the next four years. That's what we have here. That's what we have in this plan.

We also have an announced $2 billion for R&D—sounds good. They've pulled money out of R&D. They haven't been doing really well, so $2 billion for R&D sounds really good until you realise there's a bill before the House right now that cuts $1.8 billion. It sounds like they've just changed their mind and announced it as new money. Again, when you hear this government talk about anything, you have to question the detail because the detail is nearly always different to the headline announcement.

Australia, historically, has been really good at manufacturing. We've seen some bad years recently. We've seen companies go in COVID. We've also seen, over the last seven or eight years, some major international trends that cause difficulties for some of manufacturers and we've lost a lot. But in my electorate we have some amazing ones. We have Thales, one of our big defence manufacturers, based in Rydalmere. It's an extraordinary one, and because it works with really fine quality ceramics we've have seen a ceramics industry grow up around it. Wherever you have one really good company with fragmented supply chains, you have other companies that grow the skill base around it.

We've got BluGlass, LED technology. It's still what I call pre profit. It's incredible new technology. They're called BluGlass, but they're now a world leader in green LEDs. They have companies all over the world that buy LEDs of various frequencies from Rydalmere—an extraordinary company.

We have Baxter's medicinal grade saline, the last remaining one in the country. There's an area, if you're talking about resilience and the capacity to respond where the government might look to make sure that we have medicinal grade plastic, medicinal grade salines—all the things that we need in a crisis—manufactured in Australia, because we have lost them over the last seven years and we have one left. It's a nice announcement, but look at the detail. The new era was some time ago. It's a wee bit late and it's too little.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.