Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023. The bill as I expect it to be amended creates a powerful new lever to move us further and faster towards a renewable future, towards improved employment and more secure jobs and towards strengthening and rebuilding our industrial manufacturing and agricultural base. It is a pathway towards better jobs and less pollution. The bill will increase flows of finance into priority areas of the Australian economy, financing the businesses, governments and other entities through loans, equity, guarantees and a wide range of other financial instruments. It requires that those investments will be solely or mainly Australian based, but the Australian government would otherwise have full discretion to define those priority areas. These are jobs in Australian companies for Australian citizens. It's focused on manufacturing and technology priorities and rebuilding our industrial base, which has been hollowed out over recent decades.

We see funding of up to $3 billion for renewables and low-emission technologies; $1.5 billion for medical manufacturing; $1 billion for value adding in resources; $1 billion for critical technologies; $1 billion for advanced manufacturing; and half a billion dollar for value-adding in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and fibre. These areas need support and investment to encourage their shift to innovative technologies and a long-term future. The fund will be funded by an initial $5 billion in equity and a further $10 billion by July 2029.

It is vital that we support our essential industries as they make the transition from fossil fuels and carbon intensive production to renewables and a low-pollution future. This is vital in our manufacturing, in our agriculture and broadly across our economy. We also must stop using public funds on new coal and gas and on the construction of gas pipelines, and we must not finance in any form native forest logging. I'm very proud that the Greens took a proposal to the 2022 election for a 'Made in Australia' bank that would support and finance manufacturing innovation and relocalising our supply chains. That was a very important policy, and I see many features of that policy in this bill before us today, especially through the amendments that we have secured that prohibit any investment in coal, gas and native-forest logging.

We need leadership to foster our local industries. Our history tells us how important the leadership of governments is to growing those industries in South Australia, in Adelaide and in places like Whyalla, Port Augusta and Port Pirie, let down over many decades by sporadic, intermittent investment, losses of jobs and insecure communities. So many of our kids have to leave those towns because there is not secure, ongoing employment. We need our clean, green agriculture in places like South Australia to find its way to a post carbon pollution world.

Our history tells us how important good leadership and good support are to a long-term investment future for our industries. I lived in Newcastle, a place I love, for many years in the early 1980s, and I knocked on the door of the general manager of BHP as he announced thousands of job losses in that industry, asking him to employ more female apprentices. It was a bad day to make the request, but we've learnt a lot from that transition in the township of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. That region has learnt that it's very important to make appropriate investments in the future as communities transition. They need early advice about the plans for employment changes; early support to make the skills development and create the employment bridges to the jobs of the future; and, most importantly, access to the kinds of funds that are embedded in this bill as they support the emergent, new industries and sectors that are the job creators of the future.

I've lived now for many years in South Australia, and we there also know a lot about what goes wrong when investment and industry policy falls off the rails. We know too much about underinvestment in our manufacturing industries in our state. It was the failure to back manufacturing in our state that resulted in an enormous amount of hardship and job losses. We certainly don't need leadership like we have seen by the coalition in the state of South Australia in our recent history. Our state is the poster child of how not to do industry development. Joe Hockey slashed the Commonwealth's co-investment in the automotive industry by a 'mere' $300 million a year in 2013, and South Australia lost more than 1,600 direct jobs in the Elizabeth plant and thousands of indirect jobs in the parts sector. For the failure to find a way to invest in that last part of our manufacturing sector in our state, car production, we lost thousands of jobs.

Many families never found their way back to having a breadwinner in their household. Many of those workers with decades of experience and skill were not able to find their way into a labour market for their future. We lost the opportunity to be leaders in the transition economy, to be the 21st century manufacturing hub that we really need, with highly skilled, well-paid workers producing cutting-edge electric vehicles powered by South Australia's world-leading renewable energy sector. We had so many losses from the failure of vision and the failure of an equity fund like this to underpin the transition to the vehicles and the manufacturing industry we need in the future.

Senator Hume spoke about this bill, calling it a 'Greens-Labor backroom deal'. If a backroom deal means discussion, negotiation, thought, looking at the evidence and working out how to find a way forward, then I'm proud to be part of it, because it's an arrangement that will result in an act which will put billions of dollars into backing our manufacturing program for the future. She also referred to slush funds. She referred to unions having a say over how such funds might be used. What a mistake.

Unions so often know through their members and their delegates what's actually going on on the ground. They know what's happening at Port Pirie or Whyalla. They know how our steel industry, our shipbuilding or our future manufacturing needs to be adjusted. Don't think those workers on the floor of GMH, in the years before Joe Hockey took a hatchet to them, didn't know what was going on and what might be done to save that manufacturing industry. Don't think they didn't have a contribution to make. The opposition has a lot of experience with slush funds. As I understand this bill, it is very far from a slush fund. If it is properly implemented—and I'm sure amendments will be considered in this place—it will ensure a strong governance structure and transparency of decision-making, which is what Australian taxpayers expect.

In place of the positive spend that we needed, Liberal governments in that period of GMH decline gave South Australia a consolation prize in the form of a defence manufacturing industry. Across a range of shipbuilding projects, this created a fraction of the local direct jobs for a spend in the billions. We got the trade of our automotive industry for a set of jobs in defence, so the opportunity to supply a really good, strong manufacturing base in our South Australian economy was missed. We missed the opportunity for supplying electric vehicles into the domestic market and fighting climate change. That all took a back seat to an ideological project led by Joe Hockey and others, and by that government and other governments, to build weapons of war that endanger the peace and stability of our region, rather than finding our way to a renewable, safe and low-polluting future.

It is not sustainable, economically or environmentally, for this nation to continue to be reliant on the resources sector. Australia should aspire to do more than extracting and exporting fossil fuels that poison our air and water and drive the climate crisis. Surely the skilled hands and minds of our manufacturing workforce have more to offer the world than weapons of war. Our rich biodiversity, in particular, is worth more as a pristine world heritage wilderness than it is as wood pulp or cheap furniture. We cannot build our future by investing in an old economy. We need to innovate and find new and creative ways of doing this.

One of the weaknesses in the bill, in my view, is that it doesn't make enough of our arts and culture sector, which is a powerful industry for generating employment. That sector employs more Australians than coal and gas or defence manufacturing, and it doesn't rate a mention in the fund's priorities, despite the industry being decimated by the pandemic. If we aren't investing in the creative arts, Australia risks losing the design workforce, which is essential to giving function and form to modern consumer products. We cannot add value by manufacturing what we can't sell and, in a competitive national and international market, aesthetics are the key to the success of goods and services: the lines of a car, the cut of a dress, the feel of a device or the layout of an app. Without serious investment in arts and education and all of our technical areas, and in the important national cultural institutions that help nurture and create talent and keep it where it is in Australia, we're letting ourselves down.

So we need to rebuild our manufacturing and agricultural workforce through skill development and through support for investment in industries that create well-paying long-term jobs. Workers should feel secure to put down roots in our communities and to live in thriving communities, not boom-and-bust communities based on polluting industries with short horizons. Our young people should be able to find their way into decent jobs—and into the training for them—in renewable, low-emissions technologies, in agriculture and in regional Australia.

Many aspects of this bill are very welcome, and it's essential also that we see benefits from it arising for women alongside men. Women need access to training, to participation in research and innovation, and to the jobs that investments through this fund will create in cities and regions. They need access, alongside men, to good-quality, decently paying jobs and to long-term career paths.

Because of our Greens amendments, this fund will not use public money to fund coal and gas. This is a really important aspect of this bill. The coalition, when they were in government, tried to use public money to fund coal and gas through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA. They couldn't, because we Greens and Labor made it impossible. Now the National Reconstruction Fund will be similarly protected. It'll focus on genuinely fostering our agriculture, manufacturing, innovation and research, and I hope it makes appropriate investments in our universities, in our young people and in developing the capability to do research that is original and new and is transmitted into real action in our manufacturing and agricultural sectors. This is so much more important and useful than padding out the profits of coal and gas, which will increase carbon pollution.

We need an industrial future that provides decent jobs and offers our planet a safe place. This is the shift we have to make. We as a country are more than a quarry. We have a very enterprising, well-educated workforce which needs opportunities through investment and support from government so that our regions and our clean and green industries of the future offer our kids and our men and women the jobs that they can build a life on.

We need to go further. We have to stop approving new coal and gas. The 116 new coal and gas projects in the pipeline must not go ahead. The IPCC made it clear last week that the planet cannot tolerate any new coal and gas. That's where we need to go, and we need to invest in our industries outside coal and gas and outside logging our native forests—our industries of the future which give our country the sovereignty in its manufacturing and agricultural supply chains that will secure the products we need for our future. So we need no new coal and gas and a lot more secure, well-paying jobs underpinned by strong government support and mechanisms like those proposed in this bill.