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

There is a lot in what the member for Kennedy has said, and I think there will be a lot of people, regardless of their politics, who will agree. In this country the biggest problem has been a failure of ambition to think ahead and to go, 'Well, we can actually do this stuff.' We've just thought, 'Oh well, there are a lot of things that other countries do better than us.' I've often said, Member for Kennedy, one of the big things we've got to do is back Australian know-how. It's not a cute line; it actually flows through to a lot of other decisions that get made, particularly by investors that need to start thinking that what we do in this country matters, that it delivers longer-term economic value and commercial value—and where it happens too. I am very aware that failure of ambition and that failure to back know-how has affected people in your neck of the woods. It's effected people in the member for Bendigo's area. It's been particularly hard for people in remote and regional Australia to get a look in. We want to make sure that happens.

There are some parts of this bill which are priority areas, in particular, member for Kennedy, the value add in resources and the value add in agriculture. I'll come to resources: you made a hell of a lot of good points—maybe a heck of a lot; I don't know if 'hell of a lot' is parliamentary!—about value adding, and you made reference to bauxite. One of the other big things, as you well know, and as many other people know, is that we have so many of the critical minerals and rare earths that the rest of the world is chasing. But we're just mining it and not doing any value adding. That's part of the reason that we're developing the National Battery Strategy. We do the mining and refining really well, but the bulk of the processing gets done in another country and we don't do anything in terms of cell manufacture or recycle and reuse. So thinking about that longer term is really important, and we're backing in the things that you're saying—a billion dollars of this fund will go to value adding in resources, so we get that.

The other thing is that when we set this thing up, with the will of the parliament—obviously, I won't pre-empt that as this is going to the other place for a final vote—we aren't going to say, 'The NRF is done,' brush our hands and say, 'That's it.' A lot of other work needs to feed into this. For example: development of co-investment plans to line up with the priority areas is really important. The other thing we need to do is work out how we can have a thread running through those co-investment plans—a thread which is basically what you've said here today. Where does remote and regional Australia get a look in? We need to understand the strengths and otherwise of the regions and how can we give them a much better look in in the way the fund will make decisions. This will inform the board and, again, the board is independent and will make its own decisions.

Coming to the crux of your point: you've asked us to set aside a big chunk of money from the NRF dedicated solely to remote and regional Australia.

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