Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I find it very difficult to accept what the minister just said. Coming from a manufacturing background, I know that people aren't serious when they start talking about 'advanced manufacturing'. The government allowed one of our core national capabilities, one of the industries that provided critical national capability—the Australian automotive industry—to go offshore. All this froth and bubble about national resilience, all this talk about supply chain diversity, counts for nothing after the government that you've been part of did everything in its power to force offshore not just the 40,000 jobs but the national resilience and innovation and capability that comes from that. Look offshore now at what the United Kingdom is doing, as just one example, with big investments in automotive capability that they see as precisely serving the policy objectives that you've been glossing over in terms of national resilience and supply chain capability. The Canadians have billions and billions of dollars going into green cars, into electric vehicles. For political sloganeering purposes, just last year and the year before, some joker in Liberal campaign land decided that an effort to invest in electric vehicles—which is the future of automotive engineering and automotive capability—was, in some way, an effort to take away people's weekends. It was the silliest thing that I'd ever heard. It was a self-defeating thing, because of the opportunity for us to re-engage with that most sophisticated, largest job-generating industry that also gives rise to the capacity for innovation and capability. It does make me wonder about the capacity of this government to think its way through the foreign relations problems that now confront it.

I listened carefully yesterday and today, as we've been circling around this question, about why it is appropriate for the minister neither to consult prior to making a decision in relation to a foreign agreement that the states and territories may reach nor to provide reasons. One of the reasons I'm so apprehensive about this set of arrangements is that the government set the tone. I think the phrase that you used, Minister, was whether the Commonwealth should have a line of sight on the kinds of agreements that state, territory and local governments or universities are reaching with foreign entities. There is no contest at all on that question in this place. But I think the way that the bill has been formulated and the language that's been used by advocates for the bill in this place would give states and territories, and universities in particular, some real concerns about the arbitrariness of the power that the minister is proposing to exercise. I've heard you say that the power would be used in a robust way—I'm not sure what that means—that it wouldn't be used lightly and that there'd be processes in place. Those commitments are good, as far as they go. But, if you're the Premier of New South Wales or the Premier of Victoria, or you're a researcher in one of the institutions that the bill seeks to cover, your most recent experience of the government's engagement over this question is zero consultation in the formulation of the bill—zero. For the states and territories, there's been no engagement in the construction of this most important legislation. For the universities, there's been no engagement and no consultation.

Senator Paterson said yesterday, 'Why should they have that privilege?'

That's not a position that this government would take if it were seeking to regulate the beef industry. It's not a position that the government would take if it were trying to change the regulations for the retail or finance sectors. It's a contemptuous way, really, of engaging with universities, so no wonder they are so apprehensive about the way that the Commonwealth is going to engage with them prospectively, if from our most recent experience over the last three weeks we've seen the government being so contemptuous of them.

It seems to me that the legislation has two approaches that have been very confused. One is the arbitrariness in the minister's power of veto and the other is the softer, more educative line-of-sight propositions that the minister has advanced. It appears to me that there are twin sets of objectives, which could be reconciled in the legislation if a bill in a different form had been brought to this place. It's harder to reconcile those two objectives, because of the government's behaviour and, for example, the government's refusal to provide reasons.

Before I ask my questions, I would like to say that I have heard much criticism from the individual institutions in the university sector—although I have to say that some of the criticism from their peak organisations has been muted; you don't hear much of any substance from them—expressing deep concern about the character of the minister's power and, in particular, about the way that the government conducted itself by not consulting with the sector. Those criticisms have been aired in this place and they were aired substantially yesterday. I'd like to understand why the government conducted itself in the way that it did. What was the rationale for not consulting with the university sector in this case? Does the government recognise that that failure to consult has hurt its capacity to engage constructively? Primarily, Minister, I'd like to understand why the minister and the department chose, in the drafting process that we heard so much about in estimates, not to consult with the institutions that the bill seeks to cover.