David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

) ( ): During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Taree was a major manufacturing hub, with Bonds and Hot Tuna making clothes, Goninan making trains, Peerless processing milk, and Stevacraft, Britax and Viison Kitchens all manufacturing there. Today, amongst those, we've got Stevacraft, Jamestrong, Speedflow, Bayview, aluminium processing and all the best and latest boat building. In the post-COVID recovery, this government has a plan to reinvigorate Australian manufacturing across many industries. Now is the time for Taree to welcome back Australian manufacturing. With our $1.3 billion Modern Manufacturing Initiative, coupled with our JobMaker hiring credit and funding of highly subsidised apprentices and cheaper training programs, it's an opportune time for businesses to look at re-establishing in Taree and in regional Australia. Unemployment levels for adults and youth are above the state average in the Manning and the Mid-Coast region, and we need to bring back manufacturing.

Everyone has to realise that we can have every will in the world, every program for training and every sort of cash boost for businesses, but manufacturing has embedded in it, like everything in the modern industrial world, oodles and oodles of electricity. Water to a farm and growing crops is like electricity to modern manufacturing. This whole building, the whole modern industrial world has energy embedded in it. We are working to address this. We are striving, with policies, to make electricity cheaper and more reliable for industry.

We employ about 860,000 people in manufacturing. COVID has decimated some of the other non-manufacturing centres. We realise that we're good at manufacturing and processing food. All our raw materials could be processed here, rather than sending raw ores overseas. The $1.3 modern manufacturing plan will target six national manufacturing areas: food and beverage manufacturing—and we have one of the biggest coastal abattoirs, in Wingham, and we have Bayview Foods, who are putting frozen foods on everyone's table; medical products; recycling; clean energy; defence industry and space. We have a lot of defence contractors in this region, and this plan will help them as well.

The JobMaker platform is delivering outcomes. As we recover from COVID, it is really time for us to focus on the essential—and that is cheap, reliable energy—so manufacturing can thrive.