Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Industry and Science. What's the Albanese Labor government doing to create more manufacturing jobs and bolster our supply chains after a wasted decade?

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

HUSIC (—) (): I say thank you very much to the member for Paterson, who is a big backer of regional manufacturing. The Albanese government is a government that believes in a future made in Australia, in the value of Australian manufacturing, in making things here and shipping them everywhere, in creating secure, well-paying jobs and in diluting our reliance on concentrated and broken supply chains, those broken supply chains that helped trigger the inflation wave that we are fighting in so many ways today. As an example, we are standing up the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund. We look forward in the coming weeks to releasing an investment mandate for the fund. We are stabilising and improving our trading relationships and also standing up our $400 million Industry Growth Program. Being a country that makes things matters. It creates sovereign capability to help us deal with international shocks—wars that drive up energy prices, new technologies that disrupt industries through to pandemics that expose broken, brittle supply chains.

I was glad that I was asked about the past decade and what we are doing differently. Frankly, the best time to future-proof our economy was a decade ago and, unfortunately, we saw a decade of neglect and decay from those opposite. In fact, it was a decade of Liberal Party and National Party government characterised by the phrase, 'It's not a race.' They were always slow to the mark and to actually deal with the types of things that we needed tackled. For example, we saw our economic complexity slip. In terms of manufacturing, we became one of the least self-sufficient economies in the OECD and we saw investment in Australian know-how plunge. Australian families are feeling the direct consequences of that approach, an approach that never tried to tackle productivity or grow our industrial capacity to help us better fight inflation.

Unlike the coalition, our government is setting Australia up for the next decade. The National Reconstruction Fund is a $15 billion investment to revitalise Australian manufacturing and create, real, sustainable, high-paying jobs, address supply chain vulnerabilities and take up the fight to inflation. Those opposite were all talk for 10 years. It's time they stop pretending to care about manufacturing and get out of the way while the government cleans up the mess that they left behind. This government will continue to rebuild manufacturing capability because it's only a Labor government that believes in a future made in Australia. (Time expired)