Future Made in Australia Bill 2024
Future Made in Australia (Omnibus Amendments No. 1) Bill 2024
Second Reading
Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (12:47): I will keep very briefly with the Eagles theme. My friend the good member for Bean, having served his sentence of having to speak for such an unfortunate bill, may well understand the sentiment, ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device,’ but, having served his time, he can now take it easy, knowing that his job is done.
The coalition will, quite sensibly, oppose the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, but there is one thing on which I very strongly agree with the member for Bean: this is quite a fundamental question. The question that this bill presents to the parliament is the age-old question which is presented to all Western democracies: are we to move towards a market economy or towards a command economy? This is reflected in the very shape of this House—the for and against, the government and the opposition, the left and the right. This is the debate. It’s been shaped in many different ways in many different times, but this is such a fundamental question that faces us. I think that in this bill we see Labor’s vision for the economy laid out very strongly. This is a vision of an economy led and directed by a very small chosen few. It’s no surprise when we think that where market economies have survived is where free democracies have survived, where the choice of the people, the decision of the greatest number, is enabled in choosing the guidance of the nation, and that where command economies have survived is where there has been a top-down approach, be that through a dictator or through some form of communist set-up. There exists a very big split between those, and the choices we make in this chamber are often very much about which one of those two directions we should go in. That’s exactly where we find ourselves now. I will just say that I think this speaks to something more. It speaks to the idea that the economy and the society that wraps around it cannot be separated. Do we choose to be directed more firmly by the government, or do we allow the invisible hand to make its way?
So this is a fundamental question and, when assessing this question, I would say that, for the Australian people themselves, the best way to assess the government is on their performance. I would ask the people of Australia, ‘Are you better off under Labor? Are you better off than you were before this government came to power?’ Sadly, we can look around and see the resounding answer to that, by almost every metric is, ‘No, we’re not.’ Insolvencies are up—we see that in today’s Australian. We’re heading towards record levels of insolvencies. Productivity is down. The greatest drop in productivity since we started measuring productivity has happened under this term of government. Prices are up across the board by 10 per cent—18 per cent for working households. New houses have increased 19.7 per cent, bread and milk around 19 per cent. The prices of gas and electricity—the energy debate that forms such a key staple of the election we just had—have risen by over 20 per cent. No, we’re not better off.
What’s important to know is that this is not by accident. There have been very firm and set policies similar to this one here from this government that have taken us down this direction. If you want to pin down a starting point, I would suggest you have a look at the 6,000-word essay by the Treasurer on how he was going to remake capitalism and how we were going to change our pathway completely from the market economy we’ve enjoyed and has driven us to be the most successful countries in the history of the world. We’re going to move away from that to something called the care economy. I think what comes to mind is that age-old saying that when someone tells you who they are you should trust them. The Treasurer very much told us what he was going to do. He was leading us down this path.
Look at our immigration policy, with the largest ever immigration intake in the middle of a housing crisis, making things worse at a time when our housing supply is at record low levels. It’s no accident how we got there. Direct policy choices take us there. Price caps on gas have led, like they always have since the beginning of time, to higher prices. We’ve got IR legislation that has been panned by industry for its capacity to drive down productivity at a time, as I mentioned, when productivity has fallen more than it ever has before.
We have a government that boasts two surpluses, but in their own budget papers confirm 10 years of deficits to follow. What an incredible choice to have made. Two surpluses for 10 deficits. I’m not sure we got a good bargain there, but that’s a deliberate policy choice. Of course, what this adds up to is that we see things like real wages dropping nine per cent. People are worse off, and it’s not by accident. It’s because of policies exactly like this.
In the Future Made in Australia Bill, what we see is a government that wants to take further control of the economy. I think it’s right that we stop and we look at the direction the country is going in. On questions of where the economy is being led, we have a Treasurer currently so ideologically driven that he’s quite happy to fight with the RBA openly in a period where we’re trying to work together. We need the RBA and the government’s fiscal and monetary policies to work together to bring inflation down. He’s allowing his ideology to get in the way of that.
I will give a brief moment of praise—because I think it’s always good to find the diamond that shines in the river—for the simple audacity of this government. Following the 2022 election, when the byword was ‘integrity’, to produce so brazen a slush fund as this is quite brazen—a $4 billion slush fund that can be increased merely at the stroke of the Minister for Climate Change and Energy’s pen. No parliamentary oversight required, no scrutiny. This is a slush fund, plain and simple. I think John Kehoe in the AFR wrote this best when he said:
Labor’s Future Made in Australia election slogan is already turning into a taxpayer-funded slush fund to spray money around for almost any political objective the Albanese government can think of.
It’s quite damning to read those words out loud, but that is exactly what it is.
I think the more we look into it, the worse this looks. The member for Bowman raised the issue of PsiQuantum. What really irks Australians who are hurting at the moment is when they see the actions of the government and it looks like money for mates. Sadly, the more you look at it that is exactly what it appears to be. I’ll read from an Australian article from Geoff Chambers and Joe Kelly under the headline ‘ALP network behind company that clinched $1bn deal’:
Two Labor-linked firms employed by US-based company PsiQuantum helped the private tech business facilitate nearly $1bn in taxpayer funds to build the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane…
Brookline Advisory lobbyists … —who worked as chief of staff for Labor deputy leader Richard Marles and communications director to Jim Chalmers respectively—have emerged as key players in securing the government equity and loans package.
It goes further. There are significant links between, on one hand, the company who then were commissioned by PsiQuantum to prepare a report about the benefits of PsiQuantum and, on the other, the offices of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Bill Shorten and the member for Parramatta as well. So we have here something that looks very much like money for mates, but sadly—and here’s the bit where it gets really bad—it’s not just money for mates; it’s money for mates for nothing. I’m going to read from Bernard Keane, that renowned right-wing nutjob:
Note that we won’t actually get a quantum computer for that money, just access to one if and when it’s built in Brisbane. Maybe that’s what a “Future Made In Australia” will look like—foreign companies paid vast amounts of money to build things here but keep ownership of them.
The more we look at what’s being proposed by the government, the more it falls away and becomes a less and less credible alternative for Australians.
Strangely, though, in the Prime Minister’s defence of this bill, he’s pointed to the Biden government’s Inflation Reduction Act. Despite obviously significant differences in our economies, in our labour market flexibility and in our relative manufacturing industries, he has pointed to that act as an example of why we should go down this path. As it stands at the moment, that act has driven $110 billion in investment in the US. However—and this is a rather important point—it is now on track to cost US taxpayers over $800 billion across the next decade. This is the key issue when you go down the pathway of picking winners. When you don’t have a market economy but instead have a command economy, when you are not choosing which way the market will move based on competitive advantage or the dictates of supply and demand but are picking winners, and when you are fundamentally providing a subsidy to an unviable or uncompetitive industry, that industry now has to rely upon subsidies to sustain itself. Once you start that, there are only two pathways: either you keep going with the subsidies forever and ever or, at the point that you stop the subsidies, the industry falls apart. What we’re seeing already with that Inflation Reduction Act is the costs spiralling because subsidies, once started on an unproductive or unviable industry, will have to keep flowing, so we’re committing ourselves to further and further spiralling spending just to keep these industries alive.
We could speak on a number of other areas we’ve come across, but at the heart of this is this singular debate laid out very clearly for us in the 6,000-word vision of our Treasurer. Should we be guided by his hand or by that of the market? Should we listen to the market response, or should we be driven by political imperatives, by slush funds, by demands of mates and by industries that are aligned for political objectives? I ask the question again to the Australian people: are you better off? If you want to assess this bill, ask whether you are better off. This is exactly at the heart of this government’s agenda. This could not be a more Labor driven bill.
Have a look at where the rest of their policies have taken us. We’re the only G10 nation where inflation has been going up since December. We have an entrenched GDP per capita recession. Today we saw the jobless numbers going up. The RBA confirmed that the only pathway for improvements in productivity that the RBA is mapping out at the moment is increased unemployment. Sadly, we have insolvency numbers going up. That’s not just businesses going down; that is people losing their jobs. That’s families having to make very tough decisions as the money coming into the household dries up.
I want to speak to one point, and I think you could not get a greater demonstration of this than the member for Bean’s contribution. Compare the derision aimed at the nuclear industry to the support for the green hydrogen industry. When you compare the relative technology readiness levels of those two industries, it is laughable that a political position could be established on one versus the other. It’s quite comical. The nuclear industry has a competitive advantage in Australia. We produce it. I’ve worked at two nuclear mines. We produce it safely and efficiently. We provide it around the world. We are excellent at it. Our expertise in how to do it is sought by other nations. We have a domestic need for it. That’s an industry that could be supported. It has a competitive advantage. It’s made here and we have the expertise. It is in our ground.
Compare that to green hydrogen, which is at a technology readiness level of 1 or maybe 1½. It is not used. There is not a buyer for it. It is not being bought. There could not be a more damning example of this than Mr Forrest’s actions. Two weeks after securing an $8 billion commitment of subsidies for the production of green hydrogen, he walked away from it. The government has been asking for costings of nuclear. I can tell you what we know costings for hydrogen are: they’re more than $8 billion. We know it’s going to take more than $8 billion in subsidies to stay in or create a green hydrogen industry in Australia. What a comical difference that a political party could choose between those two. I think it speaks to the intent and the problems with a bill like this. When you are command-driven, when you have a command economy, where a government or a select few pick winners, you make terrible mistakes, and those mistakes have consequences.
We very sensibly oppose this bill. We do so on grounds that are fundamental to our beliefs. I think it’s very clear where the government wants to drive this economy: further and further under the dictate of a chosen few.
