Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Now more than ever, Australia needs a national plan for Australian manufacturing. COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of a strong manufacturing sector. The pandemic has, sadly, demonstrated how vulnerable we are to global supply chain shocks, and it has been our local manufacturers who have answered the call when we needed medical equipment, adapting to making critical supplies, and when we needed smarter and more-sophisticated manufacturing in our economy.

Our nation needs a plan for Australian manufacturing—a comprehensive plan for the future and one that can be used as part of a road map to recovery for our national economy. COVID-19 has only highlighted this problem, not exposed it; it has been laid bare for some time. During the last seven years when the Liberals have been in power, we have not seen a plan for manufacturing in Australia. It's only during this crisis, as other parts of the economy have already collapsed, that the government starts to point to a manufacturing led recovery, having hollowed out manufacturing industries all the while before, leaving them much weaker in terms of their capacity to play this role. We've seen a Liberal government goad the Australian car manufacturing industry into leaving, which they duly did. They've failed to support TAFE and training, ripping $3 billion from training and seeing the biggest drop in apprenticeships and trainees. The budget update would have been a perfect time to do something about manufacturing and to talk up what plans the government has, but, sadly, there was nothing.

The only plan that this government has is to rip almost $2 billion out of research and development. I note that the government has deferred the reporting date for the economics committee's inquiry on the research and development bill, but I think that they're conveniently delaying the political pain of the fact that they want to continue to rip that money out of the budget, while they'll come up with some small grants program for manufacturing when we finally get to the budget in October. Their manufacturing led recovery is nothing more than spin and talk from our marketing led Prime Minister. In the meantime, Australia continues to lose its economic complexity—the knowledge intensity of our economy—which is embedded in the products we export. Currently, the knowledge intensity in our economy is, sadly, more likely to be reliant on imports than producing unique products for export in our nation.

In 1995, when it came to research and development, Australia ranked 57th in the world. But in 2017 we ranked only 93rd. So, without more investment in research and development, we will lose more of our economic complexity and become, again, even further reliant on commodity exports. We need to capitalise on our mineral wealth, our world-renowned produce, our universities and our skilled workforce. But, instead, we have a government that wants to rip more money out of Australia's universities. We need to invest in new industries, like battery technology, and not simply send our raw materials overseas. Advanced manufacturing and new technology should be the path for the future.

But, rather than looking to this, the government want to increase the tax burden on innovative firms that do research and development in our nation by some $2 billion. We need a real plan for Australian manufacturing. After seven years, we still have no plan for manufacturing from the Liberal government. We have a government that simply like to talk up manufacturing while presiding over its decline. You can see that when they talk about a so-called gas led recovery, yet they've done nothing to bring cheap gas to shore here in Australia. They have ripped millions out of our university sector, millions out of research and development and millions out of CSIRO. It's time for a real plan for manufacturing in our nation.