Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of this motion today. But I also want to go further. This motion talks about the need to have a comprehensive innovation policy in Australia so that the high-skill, high-wage jobs of the future are here in Australia. And it talks about the loss of jobs in the automotive sector. Yes, this government has failed to protect the jobs of Australian workers in the auto industry. And yes, this government has failed to articulate an innovative plan to move this industry and other industries into the 21st century. And yes, this government has failed to give workers who have lost their jobs a proper transition to a new way to make a living.

But it is not just the Abbott-Turnbull government that has failed. In the wake of the exit of the big three car manufacturers—Ford, Holden and Toyota—from South Australia and from my home state of Victoria, the Rudd-Gillard government's Automotive Transformation Scheme provided a stopgap solution but failed to provide an adequate pathway for local auto manufacturing to shift to the technologies and the jobs of the future. It was basically trying to prop up what we will see are the industries of the past. We need to work out how we can shift those jobs to the technologies of the future.

This week in this place the Greens introduced a bill that will amend the Automotive Transformation Scheme. It would expand the scheme, broaden its applicability, and it would put electric vehicles at the forefront of the transition of this vital Australian industry. Anyone looking at the shape of our transport sector at the moment knows that the future for transport is electric vehicles and public transport. On public transport we know that we have to get the mode shift. We have to get, not everyone, but a proportion of people out of their cars and into public transport so that our cities are not congested and they will work better. We know that that is going to mean investment in trains, in trams and particularly in buses. I will come back later to the bright future I think we have with the expansion of bus manufacturing in Australia.

Think about the values, the importance and the benefits of now moving to public transport and think about the trips that will continue to be made in private vehicles in the future. Of course, there are going to be many trips across Australia, across our cities and across our regions that are going to continue to be made by private vehicles. Think about the benefits when those vehicles have shifted from being old, polluting, fossil-fuelled vehicles, such as we have at the moment, to 100 per cent renewable energy powered electric vehicles. Think of the pollution that just won't be there in our cities. Look out over Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, our major cities, on an autumn or spring morning—as I did recently looking over Melbourne from the sixth floor of a building—and you will see a pollution haze, which is almost all from polluting cars in our cities. Think of the change that would come when the vehicles on our streets are powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. Think of the clean air. Think of being able to breathe that clean air. Think of the health benefits of those electric vehicles being powered by 100 per cent renewable energy.

We know that electric vehicles are the way of the future. We know they are ramping up at the moment. We know that that is where the industry is going. We can be building those in Australia, and, certainly, what we can be manufacturing is the components that go to make up the electric vehicles. I think we have to acknowledge that the manufacturing sector is globalised. We are a part of global supply chains. There will be bits and pieces from all over the world that will come together in electric vehicles that are assembled somewhere in the world. All of these vehicles need those high-tech components. The Greens have a vision to have Australian made components in every electric vehicle in the world. That would mean we could have the skilled jobs remain in Australia, especially in Victoria and South Australia, which are going to be hardest hit by the exit of the big-three car makers.

The bill we introduced this week would do this by broadening the eligibility for the Automotive Transformation Scheme, and by outlining a way to redirect existing funding in order to encourage investment in the manufacture of electric and other non-fossil-fuel powered vehicles.

The critical thing is that this transition must be done quickly. Ford, Holden and Toyota are moving out from next year. We have to get this underway urgently to give the components industry a chance of surviving their exit. There are so many thousands of hard-working Australians who this affects. This is not just a story of innovation, technology and industry. It is a story of people. It is a story of the people who are currently employed at the Toyota factory at Altona, near where I grew up. It is a story of the people who are employed at the Ford factory in Broadmeadows, in Melbourne, which currently has an unemployment rate that is amongst the highest in Australia. I just shudder to think what the impact on the local economy will be from the loss of jobs from that Ford manufacturing plant. It is a story of Ford in Geelong, as well, and the impact on the local people there. It is a story of the people in Adelaide, which, again, has an unemployment rate amongst the highest of the cities in this country. These are the people we need to be supporting, and we can support them. We just need to have that vision and a clear strategic plan as to how to maintain employment in these high-tech industries.

We have bright examples that are there ready to be built upon. It was very encouraging to be at the recent Senate inquiry to hear evidence given by a company based in Dandenong, Nissan Casting. The company is manufacturing high-tech components for the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. They are currently employing 100 people there. They have benefitted from funding that was available under the Automotive Transformation Scheme, but now find themselves in a situation where they will not be able to benefit from that because the volumes of their components are unlikely to be high enough. So they are facing a situation, just at the same time as Holden, Ford and Toyota are moving out of Australia, of not knowing themselves whether their future is secure. They are just the sort of company that we should be able to broaden and encourage, through redirecting existing funding, to enable them to not only maintain their workforce of 100 people, but to expand it. They told us that, potentially, they could provide another 30 jobs, but it requires the re-tooling of a lot of their production lines to provide components for the next generation of Nissan Leaf vehicles. But, without extra support, they really do not know whether they are going to be able to continue their operations here in Melbourne. They need the support of government. They will need a small amount of money, but in terms of maintaining these really high-skilled, high-tech industries in Australia, this is just the sort of industry the government needs to support. The current Automotive Transformation Scheme is falling down and is not supporting them.

Another example is from two weeks ago, when I attended the launch of Brighsun electric buses. Brighsun are a company that have been manufacturing electric drivetrains and batteries in China, and they are now looking at wanting to expand their operations and to manufacture buses all of over the world. They want to establish their global headquarters in Melbourne, but at the moment they do not know whether they are going to get the support from government to do that. They want to initially bring in the electric motors and the drivetrains from China and then use components that are being made in Australia to assemble their electric buses here in Melbourne and then provide buses to support public transport all over Australia.

These are not just any ordinary buses. They are the sorts of buses that five years ago we thought would have been just a shimmer on the horizon. They have shown that these buses can travel 1,000 kilometres on one charge. Last week they had a test drive of one of their buses, and it drove from Melbourne to Sydney—over 1,000 kilometres—on one charge. This will transform the applicability and the value of electric buses. Really, I cannot see why we should not be shifting our bus fleet across Australia—the bus fleets that are travelling between our major cities and the bus fleets that are providing public transport in our cities—to electric buses. Just think of the pollution benefits. At the moment, one of the issues with buses in our cities—when you have too many buses—is the massive pollution that is caused by those diesel buses. If we can have fleets of electric buses that are able to provide that clean, green transport and to cater for the shift of people using public transport, it would be an incredible opportunity to change the way that we run transport in our cities. There is that potential.

We know that we need to be getting people out of their cars and into public transport, and we also know that it is very expensive to provide that public transport if it is going to be using trains and trams. But buses, because they go on our existing roads, can easily slot into the existing networks, and we know that, if we provide a bus service that runs at 10- or 15-minute frequencies, people will use it. The potential of electric buses in Australia is massive.

Brighsun are currently not eligible for assistance under the Automotive Transformation Scheme, because it was set up to provide funding for car manufacturing. It was set up to provide funding for, basically, the big three companies that would be benefitting from it. In order to be eligible, companies had to be producing more than 30,000 vehicles in any one year. As much as I think that there is potential for electric buses in Australia, I think the likelihood of Brighsun manufacturing 30,000 buses in any one year is quite small. We need to be able to redirect the funding that is currently allocated to the Automotive Transformation Scheme—not extra funding; existing funding—to support these industries of the future. Think about the technology that has gone into these buses. These buses can travel 1,000 kilometres on one charge—and they are buses; they are big vehicles. Think about the potential for electric trucks and what that could mean for the transformation of our freight industry. Think about the potential for electric government vehicles, for police and emergency service vehicles, for ambulances—for all types of vehicles.

I also think there is potential with that sort of electric vehicle manufacture to be able to share the technology with our neighbours in the Asia-Pacific. On a recent parliamentary delegation to the Pacific—to Fiji, PNG and Vanuatu—they told me how the police vehicles could not get to domestic violence victims because they did not have the money to put petrol in their vehicles. Just as we are supporting our Pacific neighbours with patrol boats, we could be supporting our Pacific neighbours with a rollout of electric police and emergency service vehicles—transferring the technology, transferring the knowledge, associating that with the development of renewable energy sources as well and have an aid program goes hand in hand with our aims of creating a non-polluting and fairer society, not just in Australia but also in the Asia-Pacific.

We face a choice. The world around us is rapidly changing—from the types of jobs available, to the way that technology impacts on our everyday lives, to the climate that dictates what we eat, where we live and who we deal with. So we cannot just sit back and play a game of strip-Jack-naked. We have to make an active decision on what industries we want to see flourish and how we are going to support them to do so. Right now the government are showing their hand, and it is not pretty. The Abbott-Turnbull government have been happy to subsidise industries that rely on fossil fuels, such as coalmining, but are letting the potential of a genuinely sustainable automotive industry languish without so much as a pat on the back.

In the 21st century it is the high-tech, clean industries that are our trump cards. They are the industries that we should be supporting. Instead of ploughing money through the Northern Australia infrastructure fund, where $5 billion of concessional loans are almost certainly going to go to the old industries—the resource intensive fossil fuel industries—to be prop up and support coalmines, we should be putting that money into the jobs-rich, high-tech industry. Coalmining does not have very many jobs for the amount of money that is required to support it. We can have jobs and we can be reducing our carbon emissions.

This afternoon the government announced the results of the second Emissions Reduction Fund. The amount of money that we are spending to reduce carbon pollution through that fund is just one per cent of the carbon pollution that the Adani coalmine would produce. So there is no comparison. We have a direction we can head in which would create jobs—which would create high-quality, high-tech innovative jobs—or we can languish with the industries of the past that are increasingly going to be unsuccessful. We have the people with the know-how and the enthusiasm to innovate. We need to get behind the companies that are really trying their best—companies like Nissan Casting and Brighsun—to create jobs and to help us shift to clean, renewably powered electric transport.

The Greens plan to expand the Automotive Transformation Scheme would achieve that. Our plans to be focused on creating both a healthy, sustainable economy, and a healthy environment, will achieve that. We would put electric vehicles, local jobs and innovation at the centre of the transition for workers in these vital Australian industries.