Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Like my coalition colleagues, it gives me great pleasure and a little concern to be standing here in the Australian Senate with a bill before parliament which sounds fantastic: the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024. It's a bit like all the mirage of promises made and broken by the Anthony Albanese Labor government to the Australian people over the last 2½ years. A future made in Australia—well, who wouldn't want to vote for that? It sounds fantastic. We all want a sustainable, prosperous and safe future made in Australia. Everybody in this parliament wants to see successful, prosperous manufacturing businesses. Manufacturing businesses provide us with so many well-paying jobs here at home, but also, post COVID, we know the risk to our sovereignty when we're not manufacturing products that we need here onshore. We become subject to the whims of international factors, such as global pandemics, where we saw the just-in-time global supply chain grind to a halt.

We could not get critical products that we needed to run our economy—things like AdBlue, which is used by our trucking industry to keep their diesel fuel trucks on the road. For anybody that's listening to this speech, every single thing you buy, in every single shop, arrives to you and that place of purchase on the back of a truck. When we couldn't get AdBlue during COVID, that was a significant problem. Getting medicines where they were needed, getting food—forget toilet paper, you wouldn't have the basics if we didn't have AdBlue. So that required a change in thinking about how we support the manufacturing of products that are so critical to our survival here onshore, as over many decades we've seen manufacturers move offshore.

When I talk to manufacturers in rural and regional communities, those that are seeking to add value to our primary products and the like, the No. 1 cost input for them is the price of energy. The price of energy is why manufacturing jobs are going offshore and small to medium manufacturing enterprises are just closing down. This government, through both its energy policies, its pursuit of 100 per cent renewables, its demonisation of the gas industry, which is going to be critical for a net zero by 2050 approach, and its derision of the coalition's plan for net zero emissions nuclear to be part of our future energy supply, shows that it doesn't actually have a plan to keep manufacturing onshore.

You can have bills before the Australian parliament as much as you like about supporting manufacturing, but, if you have other ministers putting in policies that specifically make it impossible to run a profitable manufacturing business because you've driven up the price of electricity so much, then it's all for nought. It's all for nothing. Once again, it is a mirage of this Labor government going out there with great fanfare and saying one thing and then the policy reality being the complete opposite.

Even today we see in an article by Geoff Chambers in the Australian that we've had 6,600 firms going insolvent in the last six months. We don't even know how many people are employed by these 6,600 firms that have gone insolvent in the last six months. Those unemployment figures have not yet had the opportunity to reach the public sphere, but it does point to the malaise within our economy. We know inflation has been too high for too long under Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers's lack of an economic plan. It's been higher for longer than it needs to be in comparison to every single nation around the globe that we like to compare ourselves to. That means, in suburbs, in every capital city and in regional capitals, homeowners are struggling with high mortgage payments. We've seen electricity prices go up in excess of 15 per cent. We've seen food and grocery prices going up in excess of 11 per cent. Insurance has gone up. Every single thing that people are having to purchase and every single thing businesses are having to purchase have gone up because Labor has been unable to get inflation under control. That is now coming home to roost with the fact that we now have 6,600 firms that became insolvent in the last six months, yet Labor seems to think that government can become a manufacturer.

I want to turn to one appalling decision. There are so many that this government has actually announced under the Future Made in Australia policy. One is the Solar Sunshot program that may have been announced by the Prime Minister with much fanfare and may have been promoted by the minister but which the Treasury secretary—Jim Chalmers's own secretary—has refused to back. The main proponent of the policy, who stood alongside the Prime Minister as he announced the initiative called the Solar Sunshot program, has actually cut their staff and replaced their CEO. The biggest booster of green hydrogen, Fortescue—remember Twiggy Forrest, that old billionaire, a great champion of green hydrogen—has been backing away from that commitment at a rate of knots. When I talk about a mirage, this bill is emblematic of the way this government approaches serious policymaking and support for jobs and prosperity in our country—and it's not working.

I want to briefly touch on one of Ed Husic's specials: the risky PsiQuantum deal. Australian scientists and Australian researchers literally lead the world in quantum computing research. We've got groups right throughout our university sector that have been collaborating on this research for a very long time. I would like to pay tribute to one in particular: Michelle Simmons, who was Australian of the Year and is a fantastic physicist who's leading the work at UNSW and is actually years ahead of other nations' work in quantum computing. So we've got Australian PhD students and Australian researchers at Australian universities leading the world in quantum computing, and who does this government choose to back under the Future Made in Australia policy? I'll tell you who they choose to back: a group out of the US, because Minister Husic likes a bit of basketball, a bit of NBL, as we know. He rates himself in that. He went on a holiday over to the US, had a bit of a chat to people in Silicon Valley and then decided to hand them a billion dollars of taxpayer funds for a future made in Australia, for a handful of jobs that are apparently going to be located in Brisbane, instead of backing our own scientists.

We will be voting against this bill. The announcements made around this bill show that this government doesn't really back a future made in Australia. Once again, it is the Prime Minister and his ministers backing their mates, whether they're Twiggy Forrest or Ed's mates in the US. It's definitely not the thousands and thousands of small- to medium-sized enterprises in this country that want to keep manufacturing and want to keep tens of thousands of Australians employed in regional capitals and in suburbs right around this country.

Again, this is a mirage. It is a mirage from a government that is bereft of a conscience and bereft of the courage to back the men and women who want to build something in this country, whether it's our researchers in quantum computing or in advanced manufacturing, and would rather back their corporate mates, be they US quantum computing specialists, Twiggy Forrest or, indeed, failed solar-panel producers who are already sacking CEOs before the money has even left the door. It's emblematic of the disarray of the government, their lack of moral compass and their lack of courage to develop policies that will effect real and sustainable change for what we all want, which is a future made in Australia.