Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) | Hansard source

In December 2013, at the very earliest moments of this government, when then Treasurer Hockey said to Holden, 'Either you're here or you're not,' began the process of goading the car industry from our shores. In that moment what happened is that we lost the most high-tech, complex manufacturing that we were undertaking in this country. At that moment we lost industrial capability, and it was perhaps the most honest and ideological moment of this government. It was when we got to actually see what they believe: flat-earth economics where they don't give a damn about people. I saw firsthand the impacts of that attitude: the loss of those jobs, what it meant to individuals and what it meant to communities, and the devastation that it brought.

At the end of the Rudd-Gillard government there was a commitment, when this government came into power, to build 12 submarines for our Navy here in Australia. At that point this government had no commitment to that at all. What you saw then was Prime Minister Abbott going and trying to shop off that promise in a way to try to close trade deals with other countries. In February 2015 we should all have been appalled at that moment when, in the empty-chair challenge that we saw on the other side, we watched Australia's single biggest procurement being tossed around the government party room like it was just a political toy. That's what they did, and it said everything about the fact that they don't care about people, they don't care about industry, they just care about politics.

We saw that again as the submarines evolved, where, as they tried to make amends in the lead-up to the 2016 election, they then did commit to building 12 subs in Australia. In order to prove that the point—or at least attempt to prove the point—they down-selected that tender to one bidder, Naval Group from France, in a way which placed our country in an appalling position of bargaining power in relation to the program. Now, six years later, we see that program come to an end, and there is no chance that we will see any submarines being built in Adelaide in the foreseeable future. That's where they have left it. It would have made an enormous difference to Australian industry.

Once again, what we have seen on that side of the chamber is the triumph of politics over industry and over people so that, by the time we get to the pandemic, there are 86,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in Australia than there were when this government came to power. When it was just a question of trying to make masks or personal protective equipment at the outset of the pandemic, they actually needed to call in the Army to operate the machines in one of the few factories which undertook that activity in this country. At that moment in time, we ranked dead last in the OECD when it came to manufacturing. What we have seen through the drift of this government is that this country just doesn't make things anymore.

The Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity measures the degree to which economies do high-tech, sophisticated activity. It has countries like Japan, Korea and Singapore all in the top five. In many ways it is an index of modernity. Right now Australia ranks 86th on that index, and we've been falling down it under this government. We are sandwiched between Paraguay and Uzbekistan—that is the legacy of this government after nine years when it comes to manufacturing and industry in this country. We need to climb the technological ladder. We need to close the gap between us and the cutting edge of modernity in the world, because where lies modernity lies prosperity and, might I also say, from a Labor point of view, lies the best distribution of income, because that's where lies the best jobs, which provide the most secure employment, which pay the best wages. And it's the absence of that which is why we've seen wages stagnate in the last nine years—it has been the stand-out statistic of the economy during the last nine years—and why we have seen productivity go through the floor.

We produce science at a rate commensurate with the size of our economy, but, under this government, we are amongst the worst commercialisers of science in the OECD. The National Reconstruction Fund is an initiative by an Albanese Labor government, if given the opportunity to govern at the upcoming election, which will seek to make a change to this, seek to create a future made in Australia, seek to invest in businesses which do help us climb the technological ladder—looking at areas of commercialisation of science and technology where Australia can reasonably expect to lead the world, or be in those top few countries in the world, in that area. We have a vision about creating industry in this country, we have a vision about creating high-tech manufacturing and sophisticated services, and we have a vision about closing the gap between Australia and the cutting edge of modernity. This government has done precious little on all of that. All they have been responsible for is drift. It's as a result of that that, despite them crowing about headline job statistics, the fact of the matter is that, in this country today, there are still 1.5 million Australians looking for work. People are either unemployed or underemployed. It's in the jobs that are generated by this government's economy that we see high rates of casualisation and high rates of employment in the gig economy, and that is where we're seeing low productivity. We now see almost a million Australians requiring two jobs in order to make ends meet. If we're going to climb that technological ladder, we need to deal with the skills crisis which this government has also presided over.

The experience of having had the international border closed has demonstrated to the nation that we are simply not training enough of our own. And so we have a situation today where there are 70,000 fewer trainees and apprentices than there were at the time that this government took office. Think about that. In the last nine years the economy has grown and in the last nine years population has grown, and yet we have fewer trainees and apprentices today than we did nine years ago. The reason for that is that this mob cut $3 billion out of the VET sector. That's what happened. As a result of that, during the six years of the Rudd-Gillard government, we saw a million Australians gain an apprenticeship or a traineeship. And yet, in the last six years of this government, we have seen about half of that number. That is the legacy of the drift and indolence of the government in their failure to actually act on the question of skills. They have a presided over a skills crisis in this country. You cannot speak to a business, big or small, around the nation who isn't desperately struggling to find the people they need, to find the skills that they require. And why is that? Because this is a government which was asleep at the wheel.

In contrast, if elected, an Albanese Labor government will put in place a $1.2 billion Future Made in Australia Skills Plan, which will see that anybody seeking to study a course which is in an area of skills shortage will be able to do that study at TAFE for free. That's what we will do, because that is actually a plan to deal with the skills crisis which this country now faces—a $1.2 billion commitment to put our country on a very different trajectory to deal with the fact that we are facing a crisis in this nation by virtue of a government that has been characterised by nothing other than drift for the last nine years.

The pandemic has been something of a report card for our country. It has been a moment to take stock. It really does give rise, I think, to the single biggest opportunity that we have as a nation to reimagine the country. The breadth of action on behalf of government is much greater. In a sense, that in turn means that the next three years will be the most significant term of government that any of us live through. It will determine the question as to whether we take that opportunity as a nation or whether we do not. It means that this election is more important than any election that any of us would have gone through.

So there is a very clear choice at that election. It's a choice between a government adrift, which has led us down a cul-de-sac of low productivity, of stagnant wages, of falling manufacturing and of declining living standards, and an Albanese Labor government, which will take this moment in time to reimagine Australia and put us on a course to greater prosperity in the future.

See this speech in context