Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the minister's statement. On behalf of the coalition, let me start by saying that there are some elements of the minister's remarks with which I agree, including his references to the significance of the pulp and paper industry in this country. This has long been a vitally important industry for Australia and for regional Australia and it needs to remain a vitally important industry long into the future. Of all our domestic industries, there are very few that have been subjected to the same intensity or combination of pressures as this one. But the minister's statement did not tell us anything that the industry and the public did not already know.

There were a number of elements in his statement with which I do not agree at all. If I was an employee of the forestry industry, with my job under a grave cloud, or one of the many thousands of former employees in the forestry industry who have recently lost their jobs then I would not be looking to this statement as representing any source of optimism or inspiration at all. I was waiting for something a bit more significant. But I think that I am right in saying that the only new announcement of any kind in that speech at all was that a new advisory group would be established to support another advisory group that was born from a taskforce that was created at a forum. If that is the case, that says pretty much everything about this government's lack of any fresh vision for Australian manufacturing, especially in relation to an industry under extraordinary and near unprecedented pressure. It also continues the near farcical charade of the Prime Minister's so-called manufacturing taskforce, which was just another excuse for more talk with no guarantee of or even prospect of any immediate or decisive action from Labor.

I recall what I interpreted as embarrassment on the minister's face at the press conference at which we heard that the conclusion of the task force made a clear statement that Australian manufactured mattered. Fancy that! The task force recommended commissioning an investigation of a sovereign wealth fund, committing to consulting with industry in the development of all regulation, initiating a dialogue on what it means to be 'downturn ready' and establishing an independent panel to advise on the changes needed to maximise the potential of design thinking. And it goes on and on along those lines. Needless to say, that task force was not even allowed to consider the impact of the Fair Work Act on manufacturing employment and it was not allowed to consider the impact of the carbon tax. You would think that they would have been allowed to consider the most significant government policies affecting inputs to the manufacturing sector, in which businesses are operating at very tight profit margins. But they were not allowed to consider them at all. Even then, they still pointed out that the carbon tax was a disaster and that the government's approach needed to be changed.

It was also confirmed this month by one of the task force members, the head of the CSIRO, that none of the task force members visited even so much as a single small- or medium-sized business in the manufacturing sector as part of their work. The government talking to real people out there in the real world of Australian manufacturing is not part of this government's approach to policy making.

Just for good measure—and in case there is still a single person left in the manufacturing sector who is not thoroughly sick of being misunderstood, ignored and patronised—it is also our understanding that yet another so-called industry and innovation statement underpinned by secretariat work and born out of a whole succession of interdepartmental meetings and discussions will be released by the government in mid-November. While all of this jawboning has been done over the course of the last five years, the government has presided over—or, more to the point, stood idly by while it happened—the loss of around 120,000 net jobs in Australian manufacturing. That is roughly one in every eight manufacturing jobs. From the time that the carbon tax was announced as policy in February 2011 to August 2012, around 33,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Australia. That equates to one job lost every 20 minutes.

Australian Paper, in their submission to the Victorian government's manufacturing inquiry, said that the pulp and paper industry is in crisis, with employment investment and exports all falling. It has not been a good time for the pulp and paper industry. There should have been a pulp mill built in Tasmania, but one has not been built. The Labor-Greens alliance has created uncertainty for the forestry industry, resulting in thousands of job losses. There should not have been years of delay in making the government's changes to the antidumping system, but there were, even after multiple submissions by the industry pointing to undue delays, costs and onerous administrative environments. In a highly competitive price sensitive environment, cost is everything. Companies like Australian Paper and Visy should not be subjected to an extremely damaging measure like the carbon tax. But they are. Australian Paper, I might add, is yet another one of the companies that has now received a new grant from the government in the past few months that only matches or partially matches the millions of dollars that they are losing thanks to the carbon tax.

Indeed, it was always the height of irony to see the climate change minister trying to take that hat off hastily and put the industry minister hat on. He is the chief architect of the carbon tax, and that role is utterly and hopelessly in conflict with his role as industry minister. His speech today was another one clearly pointing to that.

I want to use the opportunity of this ministerial response to draw attention once again to the sharp contrast between the government and the opposition when it comes to industry policy. We will start by abolishing the carbon tax. We have also announced our intention to change Australia's standards regime to ensure that imported products better comply with the same mandatory standards imposed on locally made goods. We have committed to reducing the costs of Commonwealth red tape to business by at least a billion dollars a year. We have announced a new coalition policy to adopt world's best practice in Australia's antidumping system. We will end government waste and reduce debt, which will take the pressure off interest rates and exert downward pressure on the dollar. And we will have a lot to say about these issues and other policies leading up to the next election.

Labor's approach is all about creating extra costs, taxes and regulations. They even try to throw money at problems to try and patch up the damage that their ad hoc policies have caused. Our approach is to reduce the harm to and the spiralling costs of making things in Australia. It is not enough to say nice words about how important the industry is. Supportive words undermined by damaging policy are a cruel hoax. (Time expired)

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