Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The criteria in the national interest framework will help Treasury focus on sectors where Australia is strong and where investment is key to keeping the economy secure and growing, ensuring that projects supported by the Future Made in Australia program benefit the Australian people, not just the companies involved. This is achieved through community benefit principles which decision-makers must consider when deciding how and when to provide support.

Including the community benefit principles in this bill embeds into law that every Australian is part of this transition to clean energy. It embeds into law that no-one is to be left behind and that the benefits are to be shared by all. New industry means new jobs. Two of these community benefit principles focus on jobs. It's so important that we ensure that these are Australian jobs. These are core principles of the Albanese Labor government—making sure that jobs are secure and fairly paid. We want to make sure that all Australians from all walks of life have a crack at the jobs in these new industries.

The workforce across the renewable sector is anticipated to rise from 26,000 to 85,000 workers by 2030 and to 194,000 workers by 2050. In my home state of Victoria we can look to the town of Portland on Gunditjmara country, where the Southern Ocean offshore wind zone has been declared. Some 1,470 will be created to build this project, with 870 ongoing jobs—jobs for engineers, jobs for operators, jobs for riggers, jobs for divers and jobs for administrators to keep it running. The Albanese Labor government is committed to ensuring that these are Australian jobs by building skills and investing in training right here. We want our workforce to be renowned worldwide for excellence and expertise.

We've also committed $70 million to establish the Clean Energy Skills National Centre of Excellence in Western Australia—more jobs for West Australians. This week we also announced a new TAFE centre of excellence in Queensland that will deliver innovative, clean energy training to Queenslanders—more jobs for Queenslanders. I know how important jobs are for Queenslanders. My colleague Senator Chisholm is a passionate advocate for jobs for Queenslanders. We talk about jobs often. We want to make sure that these jobs are available to everyone in the community.

Historically, there have been challenges with diversifying the job market in the energy sector. The Future Made in Australia program and the net zero energy transition gives us all an opportunity to rewrite that story. We want women bringing their minds and hearts to this sector, and so we have committed $55.6 million to the Building Women's Careers Program to expand support for women's training in clean energy. This means more jobs for women.

We have heard there is more to be done to bring First Nations people into this workforce, and we are committed to doing what it takes to build opportunities to support First Nations people to take up the education and training required to be part of this new world. To clarify how important it is to the Albanese Labor government that these programs benefit First Nations communities, we propose adding a new community benefit principle of supporting First Nations communities and traditional owners to participate in, and share in the benefits of, the transition to net zero—more jobs for mobs.

Through the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs inquiry on First Nations' economic prosperity, we've heard from businesses and communities at the cutting edge of entrepreneurship. They've told us they're looking at renewable energy for their future. In Gippsland this is happening in real time. The Gippsland offshore wind zone falls on Gunaikurnai country. The Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation know that clean energy is the future. Troy, Daniel and the team are doing incredible work. They understand the impact that climate change has had on their country through fire, flood and extreme weather. They know that the transition to renewable energy is important and will reduce the effects of climate change. They can also see the enormous opportunity for their people in being at the forefront of building cleaner, cheap energy stations on their land.

And so they are organising and preparing themselves for negotiations with developers. They are doing this knowing their negotiation position is strengthened by the fact that government is looking for projects with meaningful engagement with First Nations people and communities and delivering genuine ongoing benefits for mob. This means we're talking about truly pivoting to economic opportunities for First Nations communities through these arrangements. We are talking about truly transforming the economic future of a generation of First Nations Australians.

We know this is possible because we can learn from Canada, where First Nations people have been involved in the renewable energy sector for the past 20 years. Canada had mandated project ownership targets where projects are built on First Nations lands. In this context, First Nations led initiatives have fostered 200 medium to large renewable energy projects and have helped generate $1.5 billion in Indigenous and employment contracts. We are getting started with a similar approach in Australia. Through the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs inquiry into economic prosperity for First Nations Australians, we have heard about the East Kimberley Clean Energy Project, which will construct the largest solar farm in Australia—900 megawatts—and a 50,000 tonne hydrogen facility. These are really significant and mind-boggling numbers. And you know what? It's created jobs there too.

But it doesn't take a clean-energy scientist to understand that these projects are groundbreaking and arrangements with traditional owners as equal partners are truly transformational, positioning First Nations people in the driver's seat of harnessing the community benefits from the clean-energy transition. To quote Minister Bowen, who is doing such fantastic work in this space: 'Indigenous participation should be the norm, not the exception.' That is exactly what this government wants to achieve, and I, for one, am very excited about that future—a future of cheaper, cleaner energy for all Australians; a future with more jobs for all Australians; a future where failing coal stations don't lead to higher energy bills; a future where my kids have the option of learning from world renowned clean energy researchers at our universities or from highly skilled technicians in our TAFE systems; a future where we build and make our clean-energy gear right here in Australia and the quality means that our products are shipped around the world; a future where regional communities are thriving not only with jobs on renewable energy farms but with jobs in schools, hospitality and businesses that spring up to serve those projects; and a future where First Nations people and communities are a central part of the clean energy industry, where they have negotiated steady, sustainable revenue streams and are no longer defined by a deficit narrative but rather recognised for their contribution, their skills and their knowledge. Let's move forward towards a future made in Australia.

Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the government's planned investment in the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, which is effectively nothing but a pork-barrelling exercise whereby you rob money from Peter and give it to Paul. Effectively, the idea that you can give subsidies to somehow encourage industry in this country is a flawed assumption. If you want to actually get a long-term sustainable industry and manufacturing going in this country, you need to lower taxes and regulation and you need to level the playing field. I have touched on this many times. The People First Party is the only party that actually has a taxation plan and a soon-to-be monetary policy capital markets plan on how to get Australia moving again.

If you really want to get Australia moving again, the first thing you need to do is lower income taxes. Our income taxes in this country are way too high both on a comparative basis to other countries across the world and as a percentage of tax collected in the budget. It's the actual people that get out of bed and put their nose to the grindstone who are the ones that actually make the goods and services in this country. There is no point taxing them at a very high income tax rate if you are only going to then clip the ticket through more bureaucracy and more departments to hand back, say, 70 per cent or 80 per cent of that as some subsidies picking winners. That is just not going to work.

The best way to lower income taxes is to actually lower the amount of bureaucracy in this country. Yet again, two weeks ago, I moved a motion that we ask the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee to look at the duplication of roles and responsibilities of bureaucratic departments in this country. That's because the amount of regulation in this country is killing business. If it is not high taxes, it is high regulation. Here's the beauty: if you cut the bureaucracy, you can cut regulation and you can cut taxes. This is my policy, or the People First policy, whereby we intend to cut the level of bureaucracy in Canberra. We think the level of bureaucracy is way too high in Canberra. We do not need two environment departments. We don't need two education departments in this country. We don't need two health departments in this country. Constant blame-shifting and a vertical fiscal imbalance is only sending this country broke and making it harder for businesses and hardworking Australians to keep their heads above water. I suggest that we do that rather than having all these handouts.

I might add, if you actually read through what a lot of this is, there is $134 million to prioritise approvals for renewable energy, working with the states and territories through the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council to accelerate electricity grid connection and $20 million to improve engagement with communities impacted by the energy transition. There are lots of these little rats and mice, with millions of dollars here and millions of dollars there. All up, it is going to add up to about $22.7 billion. To put that into context, for 14 million Australian workers $1,500 of their income tax is going to be spent on this bill alone. If you want to actually get the country moving again, I suggest you cut the income tax by $1,500 and let the Australian people keep their hard-earned dollars. That is how you would actually get the country moving again. Yet again, there are no real sustainable solutions in any of this.

Another thing we need to look at is why did we get rid of stamp duty on share trading when we introduced the GST and not payroll tax? All we have done is encourage foreign speculators to come in here and buy up a percentage of Australian shares and assets and not have to pay stamp duty. That is not fair to Australian businesses, Australian householders and Australian farmers, who all have to pay stamp duty on their real assets. We have allowed the stock market, of which 50 per cent is high-frequency foreign traders, to come in here and manipulate prices and scalp prices. Why not—and this is one of our policies—bring back stamp duty on share trading and abolish payroll tax? This is a tax on speculation, and then that tax would help remove a tax on productivity. Payroll tax would be the dumbest tax in this country and the dumbest form of regulation. You are taxing employers to basically employ people. Not only that but they then have to comply with the six different states as to the different thresholds and different rules as to the definition of 'contractor' and who is a full-time employee and who isn't. These laws are ridiculous. Yet again, I will emphasise this: forget the pork-barrelling and let's get serious about reducing regulation.

Another thing is that I will contradict the statement by Senator Reynolds that we need to attract foreign capital. We do not need to attract foreign capital into this country. The words of our national anthem are 'wealth for toil'. We have this thing called equity. There are two types of capital: debt and equity. Our forefathers built the equity in this country. Equity is title. As a sovereign country, we have title over all the natural resources in this country; we do not need to go out and tap financial markets for foreign debt or have foreigners come in here and buy our infrastructure. That is fundamentally flawed.

If you want to tap the wealth in this country—our untapped wealth—you need to create an infrastructure bank. If I was to come in here today and say I was going to put forward a private senator's bill to stop private companies from issuing new shares—let's say BHP wanted to issue new shares to start a new iron ore, coal or nickel mine—people would think that was ridiculous. And it is ridiculous, mind you, yet governments will not issue new shares to build infrastructure.

People often come back at me that I don't understand anything about finance and say, 'That's MMT.' No, modern monetary theory is where you issue credit without actually securing it against an asset. This policy that I'm suggesting is to have an infrastructure bank that will only issue infrastructure bonds against seven sovereign assets: dams, power stations, roads, rail, ports, airports and telecommunications. That is how you go about unlocking the wealth of this country, whilst actually retaining title over that wealth.

The continual verbal diarrhoea I hear from many politicians in this country saying that we have to rely on foreign capital needs to stop. When Paul Keating lifted the capital controls in 1985, we saw Australia flooded with foreign debt. We saw foreign debt rise amongst the four major banks from $8 billion to $800 billion. All that did was to double house prices relative to income, which meant two parents had to go to work, which meant, of course, that children had to go into child care. We've now got a whole childcare industry which is sucking 200,000 people out of other industries in order to prop up the banks, because Australia's household debt relative to income is 120 per cent. We've got one of the highest household debt levels in the world because Paul Keating lifted capital controls. We've now got a massive immigration Ponzi scheme. I heard from a real estate agent this morning who said that, basically, immigrants are being used to buy houses. Australians are having to sell their houses because they can't meet the mortgage and they're going back into the rental market. Rather than getting more Australians into housing, our lax capital controls are actually causing Australians to now end up as renters. That is not a country we want to see.

If we want to encourage productivity in this country, we need to start building infrastructure and we need to internally fund that infrastructure. If you build more dams, more power stations, better roads and more ports, not only will you supply essential services to the Australian people but you will actually push down the cost of doing business—and that is the true way to make us compete on manufacturing. If we build more power stations—for example, out near my home town of Chinchilla, where there are 400 million tonnes of coal sitting just below the surface—we can provide cheaper energy. I know that strategy works because I grew up in a state that used to run on the back of about 10 coal-fired power stations that provided cheap and reliable energy. Indeed, Queensland in the late eighties had the cheapest energy in the world as a result of the power stations that were built across the state. That is the way.

With cheap energy, removing payroll tax, having lower income tax and having fewer regulations, businesses can be more competitive. They can't compete, at the moment, when we've got a government that inserts itself into every little thing in not just business but peoples' personal lives—that is increasing the size of bureaucracy. We are now hitting combined GDP spending across three levels of government of almost 40 per cent. It was 36 per cent when I first came into this chamber, back in 2019. The combined government spending in this country, as a percentage of GDP, is higher than that of China—and China's considered a communist country. Well, if China is considered a communist country, what do you call Australia with that level of government spending? Think about it; it's not right.

The last piece of this puzzle is that we need to level the playing field for Australian business. Australian businesses cannot compete against foreign business in this country, because foreign businesses can send their profits offshore—and I've spoken about this many times—and use the withholding tax rates that are favoured to send capital offshore. This is what drives me mad when I hear politicians talk about how we've got to attract foreign capital. Whilst they're saying that, the reality is that our domestic earnings that should be retained here in Australia to build up our equity is being sent offshore.

We're allowing the likes of Facebook and Pfizer—and I've quoted Pfizer in this chamber before—who, in 2022, had an operating profit ratio of just seven per cent here in Australia against a worldwide operating profit ratio of 35 per cent. Why? Because they sent a billion dollars of their earnings offshore back to Ireland, of all places. Why did they do that? Because the withholding tax on royalties in this country is 10 per cent; Ireland has a company tax rate of 12½ per cent. Ten plus 12½ is 22½. If you subtract the 30 per cent tax deduction that they pay here, you've got a 7½ per cent tax arbitrage. Put that across a billion dollars worth of earnings sent offshore and voila! For the sake of a couple of accounting journals and setting up a few subsidiaries here and there, you've just saved yourself $75 million. This stuff goes on across a heap of multinational companies. This won't stop unless we lift the rate of withholding tax on profits sent offshore.

I notice here that there's $15.7 million to strengthen scrutiny of high-risk foreign investment proposals. If you want to spend $15 million, I suggest you spend it on rewriting our tax treaties so we stop giving our profits away to foreign countries for nothing. That's what we are doing. We have title over the assets in this country. We have title over the wealth. That's what a sovereign country is, and yet we let the profits go offshore for next to nothing. We tax it very little. I can assure you that Australian businesses, when they have to pay 30 cents on the dollar, can't compete against foreign multinationals who can get away with lowering their true company tax here in Australia down to one or two cents because they're allowed to shift most of their profits offshore.

The rorts have to stop. This is nothing but doublespeak here. Ultimately, you've had to collect the money you're paying out in this program, which is $22 billion, out of the pockets of hardworking Australians. The idea that you can rob Peter to pay Paul doesn't work. What I would suggest is that you get serious about making some genuine structural improvements to the way our economy is run, put sovereignty in front of bowing down to foreign interests, put Australians and active, actual income in front of passive income, reduce the red tape and get serious about cutting down the bureaucracy in this country.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 and the Future Made in Australia (Omnibus Amendments No. 1) Bill 2024. As my coalition colleagues have made clear, we're opposing these bills, and we encourage all those in the chamber to do the same. I say that because these are bills that will not or rather cannot deliver for Australians and Australian business. These are two of those pieces of proposed legislation that sound worse and worse the more we learn about them.

We in the coalition are rightly proud of the national manufacturing sector. The coalition has championed it for decades and continues to do so. Unfortunately, when you look beneath the spin and slogans, this legislation provides no such support. That is because manufacturing requires far more than superficiality. It begins with sound economic management, which includes less regulation, more flexible workplaces, affordable and reliable energy and an incentive based tax system. Instead, these bills take a page straight out of the Labor Party economic playbook, and its priorities are, as usual, all wrong. It's empty words instead of substance; bigger government instead of business investment; pork-barrelling instead of a strong economy; and, worst of all, greater inflation at precisely the time when Labor should be doing everything in its power to tackle it, leaving Australian business and households to deal with the financial consequences.

It has already been said in this chamber, but it deserves to be said again: the Future Made in Australia legislation is not about securing our future; it is about securing Labor's political interests. It is handing out taxpayer money to favoured sectors without the transparency that Australians rightly expect.

This legislation opens the way for the Albanese government to funnel public funds through Export Finance Australia and ARENA, transforming them into political weapons instead of drivers of economic progress. Let's explore the changes to ARENA, for example. Established as a research and development agency, Labor previously opposed expanding ARENA's scope to include reasonable, net zero related R&D expenditure that included carbon capture and storage and blue hydrogen. Labor has since changed its tune. This legislation now expands ARENA's remit to include deployment, manufacturing and commercialisation, all of which are very removed from ARENA's original purpose.

The reality is that this is nothing more than a plaything for the minister for climate change, the Hon. Chris Bowen, who will have the power to roll out billions of dollars without parliamentary oversight. Indeed, it gives the climate change minister the power to increase ARENA's funding, free from scrutiny, with up to $3.9 billion able to be spent with a single stroke of Minister Bowen's pen.

These bills also task the Treasurer and the Treasury with deciding whether a sector of the Australian economy deserves investment or not. They will consider the investment against a very narrow set of criteria. We heard in evidence during Senate estimates that key investments for Australia's energy future and sovereign capability, from carbon capture and storage to gas and nuclear, will not be eligible. On one level, it's hard to take it seriously, especially given that it's overseen by Dr Jim Chalmers, a Treasurer who has never worked in business and has made it abundantly clear he does not understand it. But we must take it seriously because its implications for Australia's economic future and the wellbeing of Australians are significant.

The bill's community benefit principles are also a major concern, given the bill will entrench union involvement in the workplace and replicate many of the same social procurement policies that have enabled the CFMEU's conduct across Australia. It's no surprise that the Business Council of Australia has warned that this procurement policy risks encouraging unacceptable behaviour and backs businesses that will never be able to operate competitively. It's also worth noting that Labor's own investments thus far don't meet the standards established by the legislation. Examples of this include the billion dollars for solar panel manufacturers that the Productivity Commission doesn't believe are viable; the half a billion dollars for an American quantum computing company, which bypassed the national interest framework and other sector assessments; and the Solar Sunshot program, which the Treasury secretary refuses to back. Fortescue is also scaling back its green hydrogen plans despite the promise of tax credits for just existing.

This is not an enviable track record, and, like the bills, it does not come from a good place, or a well-informed one. It explains the views of the productivity commissioner, Danielle Wood, who has warned of the cost to the taxpayer. She has said:

"If we are supporting industries that don't have a long-term competitive advantage, that can be an ongoing cost. It diverts resources … "

She went on to say:

"We risk creating a class of business that is reliant on government subsidies … "

One of Ms Wood's predecessors, Gary Banks, has gone further in describing the policy as 'a fool's errand' that risks propping up 'political favourites'.

It's worth considering why Australian manufacturing and industry are in their current position, a position characterised by dilemma. Labor's energy, industrial relations and taxation policies make Australia a less and less attractive place for business investment every day. About 19,000 businesses have gone under since Labor took office, which is the highest number on record.

The news today, of course, speaks of more small businesses collapsing. Productivity is down, and businesses are struggling just to keep their doors open and staff employed, let alone to flourish and grow. In addition to failing to mitigate these problems, this bill makes a bad situation worse by fuelling inflation rather than tackling it. It's well and truly on the record that the RBA governor, Michele Bullock, has termed inflation in Australia 'homegrown' and 'sticky'. And it's taking its toll. Prices have risen by 10 per cent, and for working households the cost of living has jumped by nearly 20 per cent. Taxes are up, and real wages are down, as are household savings, which have fallen 10 per cent. A household with a $750,000 mortgage is now $35,000 worse off. There have been 13 interest rate rises under Labor as the RBA is forced to do the government's heavy lifting rather than the government doing its own heavy lifting. Since taking office, Albanese government has pushed ahead with $315 billion in new spending, seemingly blind to its effects on Australian households and, soon, the whole economy. This is not the sound economic management Australians and our manufacturing sector expect and deserve.

That is where the coalition comes in with a clear, back-to-basics economic plan to get the national economy on track. We will cut inflationary spending, prioritising reasonable spending that will deliver real benefits to households and businesses. We will cut Labor's tangle of red tape, removing the regulatory roadblocks that are blocking innovation and entrepreneurialism. We will make it easier for business to grow and create jobs. We will deliver a fairer, lower and simpler tax system so people can keep more of what they earn. We will ensure access to cheaper and more reliable energy. That's how you build a strong and resilient economy. That's how you boost productivity, tackle inflation and genuinely meet the needs of Australians. You don't do it with slogans. You don't do it with handouts guided by political priorities. That is what these bills do and it's why Future Made in Australia is not the answer to Australia's economic challenges.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today to the Future Made in Australia bills, The Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 and the Future Made in Australia (Omnibus Amendments No. 1) Bill 2024. Now, the titles sound really good, and it's notable because this would be the first time in over 30 years that we might see the government take a more active role in investing in public infrastructure. We welcome government investment and government ownership in the positive infrastructure to build the society that we need in a climate crisis and to build the infrastructure that our community wants to see investment in. It's pretty clear that we can't rely on the private market to do that, or we wouldn't be in the pickle that we're in and we might not be in the climate crisis that we're in. I reflect also on the level of privatisation that we've seen in the last few decades to indicate clearly that the private market is not acting in the interests of the community; they're clearly acting in the interests of their own profit margins.

We are thrilled that there's the notion that we might become a country that builds stuff again. We have taken to successive elections pro-manufacturing policies. We would love to see some serious public investment in clean, green, positive infrastructure that provides for the community and that protects the planet at the same time. We would love to see that, but we're just a little bit not sure that that's what this bill will actually deliver. That's because there are no guardrails in this bill about what public money can't be used for. There's nothing in this bill that says: 'Well, you can't use this money to open a new coalmine. You can't use this money to open a new coal seam gas well in some of our best food-producing land. You can't use this money to build more weapons components to export to make the world's conflicts worse.' There's nothing in this bill that says that, and that is extremely concerning. One might hope that that's an oversight that the government will be happy to fix when the Greens move amendments to rule out those sorts of things, but I've been here for a little while now and I'm afraid I don't think it is an oversight. In its current form, this Future Made in Australia Bill could very well be a future for the coal, oil and gas industries past 2050, long after when we should have transitioned off fossil fuels and onto 100 per cent clean renewable energy that is job rich and will help us tackle the climate crisis.

I also add that not only does this bill not rule out giving public money to the fossil fuel sector; but we already have $11 billion of public money that goes to the fossil fuel sector in this nation's budget. That is a, sadly, bipartisan commitment multiple successive governments of different colours have all backed in, giving approximately $11 billion of public money to the coal, oil and gas industries, to the private sector, to the fossil fuel companies that are creating the climate crisis that is causing the bushfires, the floods and the biodiversity devastation that we are all suffering from. So don't you think they're already getting enough public money? Why do you need a bill that doesn't rule out giving them even more? We'd like you to see you abolish those fossil fuel subsidies and give that money back to the public in the form of services that will help them—help their lives be easier and help them get access to schools, hospitals and clean energy on their rooftops.

But that doesn't seem to be the direction that this government is heading in. In fact, already in this term of government, since they came to office they've approved 28 new coal and gas projects. So, on top of continuing the $11 billion of subsidies with public money to the fossil fuel sector, this government has approved 28 new coal and gas projects. We had an election. We changed the government. There were a whole lot of reasons for that, but one of those reasons was that the last government was not taking the climate crisis seriously. It wasn't keeping people safe and it wasn't protecting nature from the climate crisis. It wasn't generating all of those tens of thousands of jobs that we know clean energy can provide, particularly in my home state of Queensland. When people voted to change the government, I believe they voted for a policy change. So it's remarkable that we have seen this government, who said they'd be good on the climate, hand out approvals like confetti—28 new coal and gas projects in a climate crisis and $11 billion of fossil fuel subsidies to help companies open those new coal and gas mines to make the world's carbon pollution worse and to make all of our lives and that of the biodiversity we share this world with harder.

Now we have a bill that's ostensibly meant to be about manufacturing, something the Greens strongly support, but doesn't have any restrictions on using this new proposed fund for yet more fossil fuel infrastructure. It beggars belief that the government didn't think about this and decide that if they want to be pro manufacturing it's got to be good, clean, green, pro-community investment and infrastructure that they support. Yet here we are.

It's very telling that in the Senate inquiry into these bills we heard from Chevron and Japanese gas giant INPEX that they're already angling for more public money. In fact, in their submissions to the inquiry on these two bills, they had glowing praise for a related policy that we believe is inextricably linked to this Future Made in Australia Bill package—the Future Gas Strategy. INPEX and Chevron were saying how fabulous they thought the Future Gas Strategy was and how crucial the stable supply of gas for export was to a future made in Australia. So, of course, they supported these bills. When fossil fuel companies are praising this Labor government's Future Made in Australia Bill's passage then it's pretty clear who's going benefit from it. It's pretty easy to see through that spin.

The government has made clear its intentions to pursue its Future Gas Strategy, which envisages a role for gas in our domestic and export economy long after 2050, when all of the science says we need to be off fossil fuels. We know that gas is just as dirty as coal when it comes to fossil fuel pollution because of all of the associated scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, particularly to liquify it for export and all of the ambient fugitive emissions that occur in that process. So we have a Future Gas Strategy from this government which says: 'Sure, we're going to keep gas in the economy, in the system and in our biosphere after 2050.' And we've got new coal projects being approved by the so-called environment minister that would be open past 2070. Not only that but we have a resources minister under this government that has opened up 46,758 square kilometres of ocean to new gas fields. I thought we voted for a change of government, and it is getting increasingly harder to tell the difference between the two large parties on the stuff that matters, like not burning the place down.

A future made in Australia cannot be a future for coal, oil and gas and, under these bills, there are no limitations on what would be funded by Treasury or Export Finance Australia. As long as it's deemed necessary to advance our economic security and resilience, it can get funding. This could also mean manufacturing weapons to send into occupied territories and war zones. It could mean that, because it doesn't rule that out. That would be entirely unacceptable during a genocide, and many members of the community have raised their concerns about this particular ambiguity with me. It could mean not only funding weapons components but that the Treasury or Export Finance Australia could, for example, finance the building of import LNG regasification terminals in developing countries so that they could get hooked on Australian gas and those gas companies could once again rake in the profits, pay very little—or no—tax in Australia, cook the planet and laugh all the way to the bank. It could mean kickstarting a petrochemical industry domestically that locks in dependency on new gas fields for decades to come. Those examples were the ones that were aired in the hearings of the inquiry into these bills, and the conclusion was,

As to petrochemicals, there's nothing in that legislation that would preclude the minister from tasking Treasury to do that work.

Sticking with petrochemicals for the moment, the Albanese government has already committed $1½ billion of taxpayer money to prop up the Middle Arm gas and petrochemical precinct and US gas company Tamboran through the coalition and the Labor Party voting together to protect the Beetaloo cooperative drilling program. The Greens tried to remove public funding for that. They voted together to continue to shovel public money into the pockets of a US gas company. They've got exclusive rights to build a 6.6 million tonne gas export terminal at that site in the Northern Territory. They don't have First Nations consent for that, of course, but then we don't have laws to require that either. That's yet another thing the Greens are trying to rectify, yet again without support from either big party. The Northern Territory government has also promoted that site as a petrochemicals hub, in keeping with the gas-fired recovery report to the federal government that intends to turn the region into 'a gas based manufacturing industry for northern Australia'. Since that submission, the Northern Territory government has submitted its stage 2 business case to Infrastructure Australia, seeking total federal funding of $3.6 billion. All of those developments taken together make the gas processing and petrochemical hub at Middle Arm a prime candidate for further taxpayer support through the Future Made in Australia legislation, because nothing in these bills rules that out. Certainly, all of the gas giants—and, it sounds like, the Northern Territory government—are already seeing this as the next slush fund that they can raid to pollute the place even more.

Public funding to expand the gas industry is unfathomable in a climate crisis. That's why we are calling on this government to redirect that existing $1½ billion to possibly $3.6 billion federal subsidy for Middle Arm to support clean industries, and it's why we'll be moving amendments to this package of bills to restrict funding streams to prevent public money from this fund going to coal, oil, gas and associated infrastructure that would lock-in long-term dependency on fossil fuels. It's not the first time we've moved amendments to say public money shouldn't be spent on fossil fuels. When the NAIF legislation went through this place, probably a decade ago now—it might have been a bit before that—we moved similar amendments. Did we get support for that at the time? No, we didn't. Surely, in the passing 10 years the weight of climate science has not missed anyone in this chamber, and, surely, you might now consider not allocating public funds to fossil fuel projects from this new slush fund that you're proposing. That's what our amendments will seek to do. Not only that; please can you stop approving new coal and gas projects.

The $41.4 billion to be spent by the government on fuel tax credits would also grow substantially above that amount under a future made in Australia. This is because mining companies operating in a remote area will be paid 50.6c for every litre of diesel burned in a generator. This fossil fuel subsidy massively discourages capital investment in off-grid solar, wind or hybrid energy sources to power a mine. That's why we're also calling on the government to end the fuel tax credit scheme for mining projects. This would remove the financial incentive to burn subsidised diesel instead of those companies having to makes investment in off-grid renewable energy systems.

Adding value and jobs by processing minerals in Australia would also create additional emissions and gas demand unless plans are put in place before this law passes to prevent the need to open new gas fields. If gas demand is expected to increase then, to make sure that that increased demand doesn't necessitate new gas fields being opened, we need to make sure that there's large-scale electrification of homes, of businesses, of industry and within our LNG terminals.

There's a lot of fantastic information here that unfortunately, having squandered my time, I cannot share. But the nub of this is, of course, that we are very pro government investment in manufacturing. What we are not for is government investment in new coal, oil and gas. There has been a massive oversight with this bill, if I can be so generous to this government. There is a massive hole in it that would allow public dollars to be tipped in to burning the planet even more. Many of those companies don't even pay tax in this jurisdiction, and they're making life harder for all of us and the species we share this world with.

I also want to flag, as I did before, that there are serious First Nations concerns about the ongoing sidelining of free, prior and informed consent and what happens on country. That's the case with the Middle Arm development, and we urge the Albanese government to finally redress this.

In its current form, these bills could just be a slush fund for coal, oil and gas, and we can't stand for that. (Time expired)

Wendy Askew (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak against the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, which is yet another attempt by the Albanese Labor government to force through their agenda on net zero but which will do very little to support manufacturing businesses in this country. As we saw here in this chamber recently, the Labor government will stop at nothing in its pursuit of its ideological agenda to reach net zero. This government, along with the Greens, rammed through the net zero bills without consultation and without debate.

Under Labor it is becoming increasingly common for these matters, many of which are controversial, to be pushed through by guillotine, without giving coalition senators the opportunity to debate them and to put on record our opposition or otherwise. This undermines the very reason we're in the Senate—to review and strengthen legislation, not to push through bills into law at the whim of Labor and their allies the Greens. The Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 is of the same nature, so I am grateful, perhaps fortunate, that I am actually able to share my views and the reasons why I will not be supporting it.

If you took this bill at face value, you would think that it is about manufacturing, that it is about making things in Australia again. While, yes, technically this is true, it's only about making certain things. This bill is solely about setting up an ideological economy, which they have dubbed the 'global net zero economy', and giving authoritative powers to the Treasurer, the same Treasurer who has overseen an economy that has delivered stubbornly high home-grown inflation, a higher cost of living and of course a higher cost of doing business. These higher costs have forced many businesses, including those who this bill purports to support, to pass on those costs to consumers.

Since the Albanese Labor government came to office, we have witnessed the most significant growth in insolvencies nationally across all industries: construction, hospitality, manufacturing—you name it. They're all hurting, with around 19,000 businesses having entered insolvency since Labor took office. They are hurting from the increased costs of their energy bills, the red tape that locks them out of key export markets and the legislative requirements that change their working conditions so that they can no longer communicate with their staff the way they used to.

Businesses are the engine room of our economy, and they are no strangers to finding innovative solutions to the problems we face as a nation. As my colleague in the House, the member for Braddon, Gavin Pearce MP, put it:

It's government's responsibility to put into place the policy settings that are necessary to achieve the step away from this energy dependence and let businesses do what they know best. It's not government's job to pick winners. It's not government's job to invest taxpayer money or to prop up uncompetitive businesses in the hope that sometime in the future they might be able to hold their own on the international commodity market.

I could not agree more with my colleague. Instead of supporting the innovation we see so often in the manufacturing sector, what this bill does is establish a national interest framework as the means of identifying sectors as potential candidates for public investment under the Future Made in Australia. Notably, though, there's only a passing mention of the new front door for clean-energy financing, and I understand that to be the role of the Net Zero Economy Authority, whose establishing legislation, as I alluded to earlier, was rammed through the Senate on the last day of the August sitting fortnight.

It does, however, expand the function of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, ARENA, to enable it to administer support to industries under the Future Made in Australia Innovation Fund and other programs. This is duplication and will create unnecessary confusion for the sector. The omnibus bill commits over $6.1 billion to ARENA between the 2025 and the 2039 financial years, with a potential for further funding of up to $3.9 billion annually. This could potentially support large-scale renewable energy projects with limited parliamentary oversight, especially during election years. This is particularly concerning considering that many of our regional communities, including some in my home state of Tasmania, are feeling they're being left behind and forced to accept large-scale renewable energy projects in their towns without consultation and social licence. It is also the typical top-down approach which we see so often from Labor.

This bill does not incentivise manufacturing businesses, nor does it create the economic conditions in which they can thrive. Instead it gives the power to the Treasurer to pick the winners. It will use taxpayer funds to allow businesses whom they deem to be aligned with their net zero goals to be subsidised, but only if they manufacture things like solar panels and wind turbine blades. But, in a blatant demonstration of Labor's agenda, Treasury has confirmed that gas, blue hydrogen, carbon capture and nuclear will not be considered under the National Interest Framework despite all aligning with net zero.

My home state of Tasmania punches considerably above its weight when it comes to advanced manufacturing and entrepreneurial spirit. There are companies like the Elphinstone Group, who successfully bid and won a tender to be part of the multibillion-dollar Land 400 phase 3 program to supply infantry fighting vehicles for the Australian Army; and Haywards, a steel fabrication business at Westbury which has helped to supply steel products for infrastructure projects in Tasmania, like the Launceston General Hospital helipad airbridge.

Tasmania has a vibrant history of entrepreneurial pursuit, and it has always done things differently when supported to do so by policymakers and economic conditions. An example is Sea Forest, at Triabunna, an internationally recognised company which has developed a special type of seaweed called Asparagopsis, which can be fed to cattle to reduce methane emissions. The seaweed reacts with enzymes in the stomachs of livestock and stops the production of methane. Since their launch, Sea Forest have reduced methane emissions to the equivalent of taking 10 million cars off the road. With their product, they are feeding 40,000 head of cattle in Tasmania and around the country. Sea Forest recently signed an agreement with a UK based supermarket to provides its products and is seeking to upgrade its plant, at Swansea in Tasmania, recently receiving $4 million from the Tasmanian Liberal government to develop a trial to investigate the large-scale viability of its products. This is an innovative solution developed by the private sector, and these types of solutions are the ones we will need in our transition to net zero.

Unfortunately, this bill places more weight on the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines than on innovative solutions like those of Sea Forest. The Bills Digest states the purpose of the bill:

Future Made in Australia links challenges of climate change and national economic capability to reindustrialisation, predominantly using Australia's world-significant clean energy and critical minerals to increase onshore secondary processing of these metals and the manufacture of products and components required for decarbonisation and greater sovereignty.

What this will do is create a two-speed economy, where those in the manufacturing of wind turbines, batteries and solar panels will be able to receive funding at the expense of those like Sea Forest. In the end, that will create an environment that stifles innovation at the expense of manufacturing goods and lead us down a one-size-fits-all path in our pursuit of net zero.

Once again, Labor wants to put all its eggs in the wind and solar basket, and this bill has become a vehicle to allow corporate companies to take advantage of that and receive taxpayer funded subsidies at the expense of innovative solutions inspired by the private sector. Why should some manufacturers receive government funding to support the production of goods and others who produce innovative solutions not receive the same support? This is disappointing and demoralising for those not eligible for assistance and will no doubt result in further insolvencies in the future at the hands of this tunnel-vision government. We cannot rely solely on wind and solar to get us to net zero. We also cannot rely on wind and solar manufacturing to help us get there. Manufacturing has historically played an important role in Australia's economy, and it can again, but this bill is not the way to do it.

If you take this bill at face value, Future Made in Australia sounds like a suite of measures to bring manufacturing back to this country. And if you were to listen to the Prime Minister, that is what you would think it was all about. Indeed, if you look at the 'Build it Here' petition on Labor's website, you see that it talks about Australia's weak industrial capacity and mentions the exit of the car-manufacturing business from Australia. You would be inclined to think that this bill purported to support all manufacturers, not just the select few deemed worthy of investment. This bill's focus on a global net zero economy narrows its focus so much that it could conflict with the traditional powerhouses of our economy like agriculture, tourism and resources. These three industries are incredibly important to my home state of Tasmania, which is yet another reason why I cannot support this bill.

Several weeks ago, we heard the news that Saputo Dairy had made the decision to close the King Island Dairy, one of our state's most historic factories, which has manufactured award-winning cheeses and other products for over 120 years. Tasmania has many award-winning food products—in fact, a lot of our manufacturing is of food—but this bill does not support them. It also doesn't support advanced manufacturers like Definium Technologies, which is based in Launceston. Definium manufactures dozens of internet-of-things devices, including Ethernet devices and satellites. These items are being produced at scale in my home state of Tasmania and shipped across the world. From supporting mining accommodation in outback Australia to creating fuel injection systems for taxis in Las Vegas, they solve real-world problems with technology. In fact, the Definium Technologies were also commissioned during the height of the pandemic to produce an integral component for ventilators for Victorians suffering from COVID-19.

These are all valuable manufacturing businesses that produce important products for our economy. But will any of these organisations be supported by Future Made in Australia? No. They won't be, because they are not the types of manufacturing this government wants to support. They are not part of the global net zero economy. Like many pieces of legislation brought to the Senate by the Albanese Labor government, the devil is always in the detail. This bill does not support broader manufacturing businesses and does not, as they claim, put Australia back on the path to being an industrial manufacturer. Rather, it sets an agenda to allow taxpayer funds to be used to subsidise companies that manufacture products used in the transition to net zero. Manufacturing businesses in Australia are hurting right now. But this government wants to support manufacturers in an economic industry that doesn't really even exist here in Australia.

As my colleague Dan Tehan, the member for Wannon, said in his second reading speech:

Does this bill make our manufacturing businesses more competitive? Does it help them address the cost-of-doing-business crisis? Does it mean that the cost-of-living crisis will be addressed because the cost of doing business will be addressed?

Obviously, the answer to all those questions is no, which is why I am joining with my coalition colleagues in opposing this bill.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to 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.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about Labor's Future Made in Australia Bill 2024. Like my colleague Senator Waters, who spoke before me, I had significant hope that this bill would be an investment in manufacturing in this country, an overdue, positive investment into manufacturing, but, as it stands, this bill would potentially be an environmental disaster. We're in a climate emergency right now. At a time when we should be rapidly phasing out of fossil fuels, this government, via this bill, could potentially be propping them up with even more public money.

Right across the country, we are seeing an increasingly unstable climate. We're seeing more unseasonable heat and damaging winds. We're seeing more people displaced by extreme weather events, such as floodings and bushfires. My state of Victoria has recently been hit by devastating weather events, including intense bushfires in Mallacoota, storms akin to minicyclones in parts of Gippsland and droughts in the south-west, where farmers are seeing the lowest rainfalls on record. While communities across Australia are bearing the brunt of the impacts of climate change, the Albanese government is taking millions in donations from fossil fuel billionaires and corporations, choosing profits over our precious environment.

As we all know, the biggest cause of global warming is the mining, transporting and burning of fossil fuels—that is, coal, oil and gas. Scientists agree that the phasing out of fossil fuels is the No. 1 task to halt our planet from cooking and that there can be no new coal or gas projects if we are to avoid environmental collapse, yet, instead of embracing a clean future, Labor has approved 28 new coal and gas projects. Instead of using this bill as an opportunity to lean into Australia's massive potential as a renewable energy superpower and to transition our economy to one that is clean and green, Labor potentially presents us with a future for more publicly funded coal and gas projects.

This is a government with complete disregard for our young people, for species that are careening towards extinction and for communities, including First Nations people, right across our country that are grappling with the lived reality of increased climate impacts every single day. Labor must wake up to the reality of the climate crisis and wake up to the reality that the government is responsible for its climate inaction. As Jo Dodds, President of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, a movement that grew from the ashes of climate fuelled bushfires, puts it:

Any government that knows what we have been through and continues to suggest that there's no need for urgent action should be held directly responsible for the next fire. It is their job to ensure the safety of our communities, their job to represent OUR interests against those of the fossil fuel industries that are driving the majority of the climate destruction. Any government which does not prioritise the people, our homes and livelihoods, our food production and livestock, any government that ignores our security from the biggest threat our communities will ever face, should be held accountable.

The Future Made in Australia policy—let's be very clear—will not, in its current form, help to tackle the climate crisis, because, simply, it opens the doors for more coal, oil and gas. The Albanese government has made clear its intention to pursue its Future Gas Strategy, which includes a role for gas in our domestic and export economies. New coal projects have been approved by the environment minister beyond 2070, and the resources minister has opened up 46,758 square kilometres of ocean to new gas fields. From the Browse project, on Scott Reef, and the Beetaloo carbon bomb, in the Northern Territory, to the drilling off the Victorian coast, our environment and climate are under threat from Labor.

Less than 24 hours after communities right across western Victoria celebrated their hard fought win in their campaign to stop the monster TGS seismic-blasting project in the Otway Basin, Labor approved two new gas production licences in the very same region. The Albanese government has committed $1.5 billion to develop common-use infrastructure at Middle Arm. US gas company Tamboran, which previously received public funding as a consequence of the coalition and Labor Party voting together to protect the Beetaloo Cooperative Drilling Program, has exclusive rights to build a 6.6-million-tonne gas export terminal at the site.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator, I am required to interrupt you; my apologies. We shall now proceed to senators' statements.