Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia is a wealthy country, and that's because of the hard work of previous generations. But there are no guarantees that our wealth will continue. In fact, the Harvard Economic Complexity Index tells us that we are going backwards. The index places the industrial capabilities and know-how of a country at the heart of its growth prospects, and it asks a basic question: how big is your engine? The Harvard index makes it clear that Australia has a big growth problem. Our engine is too small, and it's getting smaller. We are in the bottom third of 149 countries. We rank 105th, and over the last 30 years we've been sliding down the rankings. In 1995 we ranked 62nd. Today we rank 105th. We're outperformed by the USA, China, the UK, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Italy and Sweden. Even New Zealand, at 68th, is ahead of us by 37 places.

So what's happened over the last 30 years? Very simply, our advanced manufacturing capability in this country has collapsed. We don't make complex things of value at scale anymore—things like cars, for example. We Australians have a choice to make, and it's an urgent one: do we want to make things again? If so, we have to make power cheap again. We have to take back control. That means killing net zero. That means getting power prices down. That means investing in manufacturing. And, to those on the other side, that means putting Australians first.