David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you! I choked on the word 'Liberal'—in the Australian context, Paul—that's all! Through years of a neo-liberal economic policy agenda of tearing down every protection for local manufacturing, of handing it over to the brutality and the lack of love of the global market, we have literally destroyed our self-sufficient manufacturing base, to become an almost entirely fossil-fuel-reliant economy based on extraction. It's those industries of extraction that keep coming here and trying to derail national policy. That's why we need this key investment, to step back some of those aggressive attacks on Australian manufacturing that have been designed, really, to destroy manufacturing at the expense of a few extractive industries. That's why we need this investment through the National Reconstruction Fund.

What we saw from the coalition was literally the squandering of the mining boom—and we saw it partly from Labor, too—from the massive increase in offshore gas and the massive increase in revenues being generated by multinationals. Both the coalition and Labor have joined together to prevent there being a fair share of tax revenue being put into things like the National Reconstruction Fund to build our future. Tax concessions for big gas, tax concessions for big coal—that has been a joint ticket from the coalition and Labor over the last decade and a half. Hopefully, we are going to see some of that being turned around, because that has meant that the mining boom has literally been squandered. It hasn't translated into a sophisticated economy that is capable of handling the shocks that our economy will face in the future. That's why we have to have this spending to rebuild our industrial base.

I do also want to commend the second reading amendment moved by my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson talking about a circular economy. Building that into our planning is a critical way forward. With those comments I commend the amended bill to the Senate.