Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Industry, Science and Technology. Would the minister informed the House how the Morrison government's manufacturing plan is working to back regional manufacturers and helping to create secure jobs and, most importantly, is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, I wouldn't agree that's the most important thing, but I will hear from the minister.

Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. Of course, the member knows, as the government does, the special importance that manufacturing has in our regional and rural areas. In fact, as the member is well aware, there are 4,000 people in his electorate alone employed in manufacturing. It is our sixth-largest industry and employs over 900,000 people. That latest figure represents an increase of about 50,000 people since the COVID-induced challenges. So we are essentially back at parity in the manufacturing sector to what we were before COVID.

As the member knows, manufacturing as a percentage is actually higher in our regions. With up to 14 per cent of the workforce employed in manufacturing in some Australian regions and about 31 per cent of the manufacturing jobs, there are about 266,000 Australians employed in our regions. It was for that reason that in March of this year the Prime Minister was in the Hunter region visiting a really great Australian manufacturing business, Energy Renaissance. They are at the cutting edge with the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries. The reason the Prime Minister was there was to announce our resources technology and critical minerals processing road map.

This government has committed $1.5 billion to expand manufacturing activity and create jobs across six priority areas. We've also backed our manufacturing sector with the Modern Manufacturing Strategy, which is an additional $2 billion in R&D incentives. Under the first round of our Manufacturing Modernisation Fund, roughly one-quarter of the projects were in regional areas. A specific focus of that fund has been in resources, technology and critical minerals. One example of a recipient of the Manufacturing Modernisation Fund in round 1 was a company called Howard Mining Systems, in New South Wales. They received funding to purchase a 3D industrial printer, a water-jet cutter machine and a sheet-metal folding machine, which will allow them to develop an integrated one-stop-shop to design, prototype and manufacture technically advanced niche product solutions for mining and heavy industrial applications.

The global mining equipment market is expected to reach about $156 billion by 2027, and this government is committed to making sure that manufacturing grows, alongside our mineral resources industry, in secondary processing and production but also in the manufacturing of mining equipment.

I was asked whether there are any alternative approaches. One of the difficulties for members opposite is that it is actually very hard to grow secondary industries around mineral resources and mining or around mining equipment manufacture if you can't decide whether or not you actually support the minerals industry in the first place. If you can't decide whether or not you support taking the minerals out of the ground, it becomes very, very hard to support secondary processing and manufacturing.