Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It may come up! I'm also not here to talk about the New South Wales election results, but I am here to talk about Collingwood's second win and them being top of the table again!

In relation to the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 and where we're going, I'm a bit torn about this because, on first reading, it's a bill that has really good motives and really good goals, and it seeks to do something that Australia needs tremendously. I thank Senator Ayres for facilitating some briefings on how this will go, answering some questions and filling out some things for me. I think that's the way governments should work. We should be trying to work out how we can make these things happen. It's always great in question time to get up and be shouted at about how we didn't support energy relief on that single sitting day, but it was the mechanism that we didn't support—and without the consultation. There was more consultation here, and I would urge that it should have come sooner. I don't think it was impossible for this side to make some changes because, while it landed in an area which we wouldn't necessarily like to support, it was only a chip and a putt away. After a bit of work together, a bit of early consultation and a bit of cooperation, I think we would have potentially been able to get somewhere.

In relation to the mechanisms for injecting the money into the market and the transparency around that, there was a fear from a regional perspective that it might become a bit of a quango, where you could see money going into consultancies, money going into investment firms and lots more BMWs and Range Rovers getting around Vaucluse and Prahran—if I'm saying that right; it looks like 'prawn' to me. We were worried about how that goes and where that goes.

On the whole process, I would like to say that I think this is a bill with good motivations. As to it being a chip and a putt, I think some of the negotiations to get it across the line on numbers have made it more of a seven-iron shot—they have driven it a bit further away than we can support. I understand that, but that is not a bad process. What I do have a problem with is that we're talking about regional manufacturing and how all the bills from the other side aren't in line. We'll potentially address the safeguard mechanism later this week in this place, and that bill will undo some of the good things that this bill may do for regional manufacturing. So we have policy working against itself and not in alignment, which is a concern for me.

I specifically want to raise the grandfathering of existing contracts under the safeguard mechanism. I use the specific example of Orica and their ammonia plants. They've upgraded one in Newcastle, just north of my home base in the Hunter Valley, to be best-in-world practice based on contracts going out to 2029, and they were about to upgrade one in Queensland, at Gladstone, to be world's best practice on the basis of those ongoing contracts. But under the mechanism that will come forward later in the week, if it passes the other House, that is now grandfathered to two-year processes. So there is no investment certainty in that manufacturing industry for Queensland, so they've pulled out of the Queensland project, which would have made a cleaner project and a cleaner process for doing AN in Australia. We will lose manufacturing jobs because of inconsistency, so that is a real concern for me.

I'm happy to give credit where credit's due, and I note that this includes agriculture in a bigger way than the previous government's manufacturing plan last year did, which is a good thing. I think the $500 million allocated, as Senator Ciccone said, in the first batch of the $7 billion can only go up, and should go up, to help support agriculture. There are many things on which Australia gets battered by others—our emissions, our exports and our mining—for the damage we do to the region, but we don't get the credit for feeding the region—for all the food we produce to feed the region and the benefit that gives to others—with our wheat, and I think this can assist it.

In brief, I think the transparency, the mechanisms and the potential generation of a whole list of consultancies that will benefit out of this are a problem. I think there are issues with the timing of getting it to market soon enough. I know $7 billion has been allocated quickly, but that is a concern for us. In some of the negotiations about what's excluded, we don't know what's coming up. In the mining areas, we don't know what's going on there. If we're talking about existing mines and what we're doing there, that's fine, but, if we're talking about cobalt, lithium or copper mines—all these things—we don't know the number of mines we will need to bring on line. Some research and some manufacturing in the mining sector will bring that on line to help the current plan, which is the Rewiring the Nation plan. The Nationals understand. We feel the motive of creating regional jobs and we respect the government for doing that, but, unfortunately, we haven't been able to meet them on this bill. We hope to have longer, earlier consultations on the next one, but we'll be opposing this one. Thank you.