Politicians often get accused of thinking too short term. The Future Made in Australia bill, is absolutely about the long term for our country.
Future Made in Australia
House of Representatives - 19 August, 2024
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. If only they'd been in government for the last ten years, they could have done all those things which the last speaker just said he wishes that they could do.
Politicians, Deputy Speaker, often get accused of thinking too short term. The Future Made in Australia bill, is absolutely about the long term for our country.
It's Labor governments, I've always maintained, that are called into being by the Australian people to do big things.
If you look through the history of our country, it's Labor governments that make the big changes. Medicare under Bob Hawke, you know, we spent 20 years on the Labor side of politics trying to build a universal healthcare system.
Gough Whitlam. Yeah, that's right. Gough Whitlam had a crack. Gough Whitlam had a crack. Then the Liberals got in under Malcolm Fraser and abolished it. And then Bob Hawke put it back in.
And you went to election after election after election, promising to abolish Medicare, to abolish the universal healthcare system, until finally even this mob figured out they couldn't win an election in this country without at least pretending to support Medicare.
You know the record of this mob over there?
About a decade ago, they stood up at the dispatch box and dared the car industry to leave Australia. They chased them out of our country and then cheered them on as they left.
We have a different view.
I'm proud to represent and have part of the great south east Melbourne industrial manufacturing precinct in Bruce, shared with Isaacs and Holt, the heart of that great nationally significant manufacturing precinct. And manufacturing jobs are good jobs. They're increasingly high wage, they're high skill, they're high value jobs.
Success in manufacturing in the years to come relies on skills, it relies on technology and it relies on cheap power. Reclaiming that advantage we had through the 1960s and 1970s of cheap, ubiquitous energy. And renewable energy is the cheapest form of new power.
The government gets this, the economics are clear, the economists get it, the industry gets it. Pretty much the only people left in the country that don't get it are those opposite.
They hear the word renewables and their little brains explode. I should issue a trigger warning, Deputy Speaker.
But the National Reconstruction Fund, $15 billion of loans and equity investment to support new investments in priority sectors, the $392 million industry growth programme, all sit alongside the Future Made in Australia agenda because we need to do more.
That old neoliberal consensus that's dominated thinking around this stuff for the last few decades, it just doesn't work anymore.
The world has changed and we have to change too.
Now, other developed nations, as I said, have figured this out and Australia must not get left behind.
The world's economic centre has been returning from over in Europe towards Asia, right above us. Moving faster than any time in recorded human history. That rate of change is accelerating geopolitical competition already expressing itself in conflicts in Europe and the Middle east.
Now, our own region is the focus this competition. The transition of billions of people from low and middle incomes to high middle incomes, and that transition from high emissions to low emissions, net zero emissions. We have the most to gain out of that transition of any OECD country with the world's best renewable energy resources. If only we seize them and invest wisely in the industries that can take advantage of that.
I just want to read a quote, actually, from the now Minister for Future Made in Australia, the assistant Minister, Senator Ayres, a very good friend of mine, and he gave a beautiful speech to the Sydney Institute not long ago, really beautiful speech, talking about how he grew up on a farm in regional New South Wales. The failure of his family's farm, no shame in that. his family's journey. Again, I should have issued a trigger. Warning because it sort of punctures their mythology, isn't it? That no Labor members actually have lived on farms or grow up in farms or no Labor members work in businesses. See, they get triggered. They get triggered, don't they?
I want to read that quote from Senator Ayres: "We need to aim high, be bold and build big to match the size of the opportunity in front of us. We have to get cracking. Australia has unlimited potential, but we do not have unlimited time. If we don't seize this moment, it will pass. If we don't take this chance, we don't get another. If we don't act to shape the future, the future will shape us."
And that's exactly what the Future Made in Australia agenda is about.