Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition opposes Labor's Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 because it prioritises and in fact is all about pre-election spin and it is not about real benefits for families, workers and industry here in Australia. It is so transparently about spin and pre-election pork-barrelling. They have made no secret of that in this bill. It provides no vision for or a pathway to our future national prosperity. It is a plan for yet more governance and regulation by those opposite and it is not about opening new pathways to business investment. Economist after economist have criticised this policy.

It's important to remember that Australia has a proud and strong manufacturing industry, which the coalition has always supported. But that support requires strong economic management that gets back on track by getting the basics right: affordable and reliable energy for business, less regulation—a lot less regulation!—and an incentive based taxation system. Everything that this government is now doing is the opposite of what is needed for our manufacturing sector to thrive for the rest of this century.

It is a fact that Australia is now being seen as a sovereign risk because of the policies of those opposite, particularly on energy, industrial relations and tax. They are all making Australia a less attractive place to do business. It is not as if international capital has only one destination: Australia. It has many, many other destinations that are lower cost and far more reliable in terms of stability, in terms of not being a sovereign risk.

At last month's Minerals Council dinner the Prime Minister claimed the sector has never had it so good. Talk about a tin ear and being in denial about the real challenges that face Australian manufacturing! In fact, in just over 2½ years, Labor has done so much damage to Australia. As I said, we are now actually being seen and talked about as a sovereign risk for investors.

Those of us on this side of the chamber know that today's investors have more choices than ever before. With the so-called nature positive legislation, militant unions are back on Pilbara worksites, and China is dominating the global critical mineral and new energy technology markets. There is nothing certain about our future in either of those sectors. In fact, we are going backwards.

This bill, along with other industry-destroying Labor legislation, including the so-called nature positive legislation, yet again demonstrates that this government has absolutely no appreciation of the realities of the shared challenges we and other democracies now face. Our industry policies should not, and must not, be dealt with as ideological toys for the Labor Party and the trade union movement. We have to deal with industry policy through a national security lens. This is something that we on this side of the chamber understand and something that this Labor government clearly has not a clue about. But our international adversaries certainly do understand the strategic use and weaponisation of industry policy.

Of those in this nation, including those in this chamber, if you ask if war is inevitable, you are asking the wrong question. I believe we are already at war, and the real question is: how do we grapple with this in terms of not only our national security legislation but our industry policy? They have to be indivisible. Yet, those opposite still do not understand this, and that is very clear with this bill.

The real question that needs to be asked in this place and in our nation is: how can we restore the rules based order without resorting to kinetic warfare? But we are not the only democratic nation that is blind to the threats that now confront us, not only in the traditional sense of kinetic warfare but also in that which we don't generally see—that is, non-kinetic warfare. And it is blindness that is being exploited ruthlessly against us, including in industry policy that is engaged by our adversaries. Australia and our like-minded allies are fighting our adversaries—four in particular—in this cold and non-kinetic war, which we are slowly realising does include the extraction and processing of critical minerals and rare earths. Yet this policy does nothing to actually assist those industries. We're fighting a non-kinetic war in the cyber space daily. There is overwhelming foreign interference by more than one nation in our nation, but we are also fighting it in supply-chain domains, for the minerals, for the components and for the new energy technologies that are essential to modern life and to modern defence forces.

Although I am clear-eyed about these threats, I am also an optimist. But, when I have a look at this legislation, I am not nearly as optimistic that those opposite actually understand the challenges that we are facing. Kinetic war in our region is not inevitable but it is certainly possible. When you have industry policies like this that pay no heed or no attention to anything beyond the government's success at the next election, I do start to despair.

To deal with the non-kinetic and possible kinetic threats that we and our allies face today, deterrence has to be so much more than simply hard military power. It must include industrial policy, not just our own industrial policies but also those that we share and collaborate on with our like-minded allies. Almost five years ago, when I was the Minister for Defence, I gave a keynote speech to the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. I started this speech with the observation that the rules based order, the world that we'd lived in since the end of World War II, was no more and was not coming back.

Since that speech five years ago, the threat China pose has significantly increased, not just because of the threat that they themselves present but also in large part because of their axis of convenience, which others refer to as the new axis of evil, with Russia, Iran and North Korea. The brutal reality is that today we have a four-nation axis of dictatorship and authoritarianism that has a single shared enemy, a common shared enemy, and that, of course, is us. This axis is, again, systematically and quite ruthlessly extending its sphere of influence. These four regimes have nuclear capabilities. They exert brutal domestic control and, ultimately, they have a shared hatred for democratic values. They are courting BRICS members and many other Global South nations to join their alliance, their axis, or at least to hedge their bets. And hedging their bets is what many of these nations are now doing.

These four nations are also adept and prolific at weaponising social media, radicalising our citizens to their cause and destabilising our democracy and many other democracies from within. They are cooperating in ways that we had not previously thought possible. But they have clearly come to understand the benefits of a shared industrial and military material alliance to achieving what each could not achieve on their own. They're doing this to support each other. They do this to be in a position to strategically deny us the goods we need to keep our economy, society and defence forces going. They are manipulating markets in critical minerals and monopolising offtake and the processing of ore. They are dominating the production of new energy technologies. And the stark and most brutal fact is that they can now deny us all categories of processed critical minerals, rare earths and vital manufacturing components, which we need for our own industrial bases and for the support of those of our allies.

As we know, their non-kinetic war against us and like-minded nations has now moved to the kinetic—into fields of war. This was done first of all, of course, by Russia in Ukraine and by Iran, with the support of their three terrorist proxies, in Israel, in the Levant and in the Red Sea. In both theatres of war, they are testing new military capabilities and their battlefield tactics. They are also testing and assessing our ability and our will to collaborate and defend democracy globally. China has a vice-like grip on the South China Sea and is well-advanced in its preparations to cross the Taiwan Strait. North Korea are providing their nuclear and long-range strike capabilities and ballistic missiles to Russia, and they're gazing very longingly over the demilitarised zone.

But, most importantly, where this bill fails—it falls down in many ways; but, to me, this is the most significant way—is their access is rapidly expanding, and they are integrating their industrial bases, not only to deny us but to quickly and efficiently rearm and resupply those four nations. They are also looking very, very carefully at what we are not doing to strengthen our own sovereign industrial base, and it is very clear, through this bill, through the nature positive bill and through everything else this government is doing, we are not developing and supporting our sovereign industrial bases as we should be.

So what do we have to do here in Australia? We have to deter and push back on the manipulation and the bombing of global markets, particularly the commodity markets. To do that, we and our allies must increase our production and our sharing of material and war stocks. But, to do that, we have to be resilient in our manufacturing and supply chains, and we are simply not. This pork-barrelling bill will do nothing in that sense.

We must act in ways that clearly demonstrate that we understand that our mineral resources are not only an economic asset but also a national security asset for ourselves and our allies—something that China clearly understands and has been working, for many years, towards taking that control away from us. With the price of iron ore fluctuating and the price of lithium and several other commodities also wildly fluctuating, we have to stop picking winners, unlike what this pork-barrelling bill does. We have to develop commodity-by-commodity plans and support, with the help of our allies, the extraction and the processing here in Australia. But, again, this bill does not do that.

We need the vision and the plans on how to diversify and find new ways of developing industrial growth here, with the support of our allies. We can find inspiration on that from how Sir Charles Court, Sir David Brand, Lang Hancock and Sir Robert Menzies worked together with a common vision to create an iron ore industry in Australia. They had a shared vision and a plan on how to work together to build roads, rail, port and new towns in record time. They did all of that work, over thousands of kilometres, in two years. Today's leaders must embrace the same entrepreneurial spirit to secure our economic future and also to secure our nation's security.

This is not a future we can secure on our own. Not only will this terrible bill not do that but it will not progress anything. Taken in conjunction with the nature positive bill and the industrial relations laws that those opposite have passed, this actually makes our nation less safe.

This isn't a traditional conflict we're facing. We are currently losing the cold war being conducted in the global mining commodity markets, which, as I've said, have such far-reaching implications. China is now deliberately systematically undercutting the nickel market, which is having a grave impact on Australia's domestic industry. But, again, what is this government doing? Nothing.

For all of these reasons and many more, I do not support this bad bill. (Time expired)