Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an amazing opportunity to be in this place to represent an area of Australia that produces so many Australian-made products. The Goulburn Valley is one of, if not the most, eminent regions for food and produce from our farming sector through to our transport sector, our packaging sector and our manufacturing sector. Every day our people of Australia take advantage of the Australian-made products that are on our shelves, and they are supported incredibly well. So, for the Australian government and for Ms Hammond here to be putting forward a motion highlighting the need for us to get behind the Australian Made program is something that's very important. Throughout the Goulburn Valley we've always had SPC and Campbell's soups lead the way, but in the last couple of decades those iconic companies have been joined by Kyvalley, Consolidated Milk, Bega, Unilever, Freedom Foods, Saputo—and on and on it goes. So we've been very lucky in one sense, because with these companies and with this Australian-made ethic also comes tens of thousands of jobs and we should be very conscious of just how important these facilities are.

We were recently talking through some industry forums about how important it is to support these Australian-made products and Australian companies even though some of them have foreign ownership, but the way that they operate within the regions means they are very much local companies. What's the best thing we can do to support some of these Australian companies? It is a question that we continually put back to our people, and they say, 'The best thing you can do to help us is to look after our farmers, to look after our water policy.' It's incredible how important it is. It's all linked. Agriculture is linked to our food production. Food production is linked to retail and what we can do to our engineering sector and manufacturing sector. It all comes back to how we support agriculture and how we support agriculture with water security.

I know everybody in the Goulburn Valley is now aware of this little company called Med-Con, who were one of Australia's only producers of PPE. During the pandemic it's been a great story the way the ADF and the federal government have got behind Med-Con to ramp up their production so they're now producing tens of millions of masks as opposed to the fraction of that which was their traditional throughput at their site.

In my opinion and from what I hear to push for, we need to get on board and push this sentiment of Australian Made. We need to education our younger generation about the importance of getting behind Australian Made every day. On the shelves of our supermarkets Australians have the choice. They have a choice in what's cheapest, and sometimes the difference is half the price. The best example, I suppose, is tinned Italian tomatoes. You can get them for half price if you want to go down that path, but there's always an Australian option right next door—an Australian-grown, Australian-made, Australian produced tin of canned tomatoes right next door.

We need to educate our next generation coming through, our next generation of consumers, about the importance of 'Australian made'. Whether we do it via a new logo or an old logo, whether we do it by advertising campaigns—irrespective of how we do it—the concept of 'Australian made' is absolutely critical, because the need for us to support our own has never been more important; it is absolutely crucial to the future of this country that we be the generation that takes the Australian Made movement forward. It really is critical in this region. We've got thousands of businesses that are universally recognised as having the connection to Australian Made. We need to support them into the future like never before. We need to increase the impact of these trusted, iconic— (Time expired)

See this speech in context