Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

To be fair to the member for Shortland, this is the point, Minister, and it's what I said earlier: the process is a joke. Consideration in detail in the lower house is a joke because they will just not answer any of the stuff that we put forward. You have one minister here, one minister there and another one who will probably come in as well, and they'll all dodge the answers. This minister here is basically marking time and I bet that in 300 days he will not be here. He's just going through the motions. He is a fantastic brief barrister. He'd be able to give you the best responses, but his heart's not in it and he will not be around to fulfil any of the stuff he just told us about. I bet you that he will not respond to any of the questions that I ask him now, in term of his portfolio. He has a whole process.

What we are witnessing now with this government is that they hollow out successful industry programs and then shift the money into another program that has been announced with much fanfare—a program that hasn't generated many jobs in manufacturing. This will be the new variant of what we see in the coalition. Basically, it will set a pool of funding aside, open it up to people to nominate for funds and have a minister make decisions about how it will be allocated, and then we will find out down the track, by virtue of an ANAO report, that it has been rorted. We've had it in sport rorts, road rorts and regional rorts, and now we'll get it in manufacturing, in terms of this Manufacturing Modernisation Fund that they've set up. The minister himself knows that in his own department.

Here are the questions that I'll put to him, which I'll bet any money he won't answer; we'll just get a dodge on them. He has a report, the ACIL Allen report, that was given to the former minister. They spent $400,000 of taxpayers' money on it. The report itself said that they've actually got a good thing going in these industry growth centres. They're not spending enough money in supporting them. They are actually driving long-term benefit in industry. This is across pretty much similar areas to those they have in terms of their manufacturing modernisation initiative and the strategies and all the stuff they have there. They won't release the report. I would love to know whether or not the minister has actually read the report. He has previously said that he hasn't. Will he release the report? Here am I, an opposition MP, asking him to release a positive report into a government initiative, and the government won't release it. Why? It is because the funding to the industry growth centres has only been provided for, I think, the next year—or maybe two years maximum—and then they'll kill these growth centres off and siphon all this support into the Manufacturing Modernisation Fund. I also want to know why they won't fund the industry growth centres for longer, given that they have a report that says they're doing well. Why won't they release the report that says the centres are doing well into the public domain? And why won't they tell us how all the investments into the growth centres will be sustained?

The government won't let the industry growth centres bid for their own programs in the Manufacturing Modernisation Fund across the different industry areas. Another question I put to the minister is: why won't those growth centres be allowed to go for that funding? The government's argument is that they want them to be self-sustaining. They don't want them to be sustained on any government funding whatsoever. They won't support them directly but they won't allow them to go for the funds themselves.

On top of all that, the government are not building any industry capability longer term to ensure that manufacturing actually does flourish in this country. Let's see if the process is a joke. Maybe the minister will prove me wrong and actually answer a question or two, but I doubt it.

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