Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the outlook for manufacturing as part of a clean energy future?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Deakin for his question. The member for Deakin, I am sure, as someone very interested in jobs for Australians in manufacturing today and jobs in manufacturing tomorrow, would be pleased to hear that the report of the non-government members on my manufacturing task force was released today. I thank all of the people who have worked so hard—people from businesses, people from trade unions and people from industry associations like the Australian Industry Group. I particularly thank Innes Willox and Dave Oliver for accompanying me and the Minister for Industry and Innovation at the release today.

This is an important report about the jobs of one million Australians. One million Australians work in manufacturing. These are good jobs for Australian working people—blue-collar jobs that families have relied on sometimes for generations. I can assure the House that during this time of change in manufacturing we will be working with our manufacturing sector. I want to see strength in manufacturing today and I want us to have a strong manufacturing industry in the future and past the days of the resources boom.

The people who know about manufacturing know that the pressure on manufacturing today is the strength of the Australian dollar. That point was made very graphically by Innes Willox from the Australian Industry Group at the press conference today, where he said it was the single biggest factor for manufacturing. A strong Australian dollar is there because of the strength of our economy, the strength of our resources sector, the fact that many around the world view us as a safe haven. So our economy is a world leader, but it is putting pressure on manufacturing, and so we want to keep working with manufacturing.

We already have a range of policies to support the jobs of manufacturing workers: our work with the car industry—to which, of course, the opposition is opposed—and our work on skills, our work on a clean energy future, our work on the National Broadband Network, our work on traditional infrastructure, our work on Australian industry participation, our work on encouraging people to buy Australian, and our work with our great scientific organisations like the CSIRO. But we believe that more can and should be done. I thank the members of the Prime Minister's manufacturing task force, my task force, for their quality work and for their powerful vision of Australia's manufacturing future.