Mr RAMSEY (Grey—Opposition Whip) (13:17): We’ve just come out of the Olympics. Australia won 18 gold medals, 19 silver and 16 bronze—53 in total. It was an amazing performance and it filled Australians with great pride. It showed that our athletes and Australia are up with the best in the world in whatever they choose to do. The heroics of Ariarne Titmus and Kaylee McKeown in the pool, Jess Fox and her sister Noemie in the canoes, and Keegan Palmer and Arisa Trew on their skateboards, and the spectacular Nina Kennedy in the pole vault—all gold medallists, winning against the world’s best, proving Aussies can do it against the world best, all competing on an equal footing. The same rules, the same tracks, the same pools and the same skate parks. It showed that Australia can more than hold its own.
But Ariarne and Kaylee were not required to wear a loose tracksuit while they were swimming. The Fox sisters had Kevlar canoes, not wooden canvas. Keegan and Arisa had state-of-the-art skateboards, not an old plank and a second-hand pair of rollerskates strapped on underneath. Nina did not use the inflexible aluminium pole in the pole vault that we used when I attended Kimba Area School, I must say. They all competed on an equal basis. Here today in Australia, our industries are competing against the world, just like our athletes, but they’re not competing on an equal basis. It is a tilted field, and some of that tilt is provided by those that compete against us. That could mean tariff barriers, subsidies, use of slave labour or enforced labour, or, in fact, use of child labour. In many cases, there’s not a lot we can do about that, except our best in international courts. But a lot of that tilt is here in Australia. It’s a self-imposed tilt against Australian industries.
Australia is energy-rich, but our industries have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. We have some of the most restrictive work practices in the world, leading to some of the highest labour costs. Our gas prices are higher than they should be. Industries have to deal with: the safeguards mechanism; compliance costs ratcheting up higher every year, year on year; scope 3 emissions coming down the tunnel at them; the highest interest rates in a generation; inflation at a 20-year high and seemingly stuck there; new vehicle efficiency standards; new IR laws allowing employees to seek double their holiday allocations; pay for ever-increasing days of leave for an expanded number of reasons; despite the generous conditions, a skilled labour shortage; the compulsion to embed a union rep in a workplace at the employer’s expense; and environmental activists who are increasingly aligning themselves with traditional owners to frustrate, delay and blow out the cost of new projects. I wonder why it is that business and investors are feeling under pressure here in Australia? Why don’t we ask Kyle Chalmers to drag a wheelbarrow along behind him in the pool?
The government says, ‘Don’t worry.’ The Future Made in Australia Bill tells us: ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll level the playing field with taxpayers’ money, subsidies, grants and even $350 off a business’s electricity.’ I am sure that will make an enormous impact, he says with his tongue in his cheek. The problem with these bills is that they lack structure and any guidance on where the government is going to spend the money, so it becomes, as has been mentioned by my colleagues, a slush fund. The $1 billion for the solar panel manufacturing plant at the site of the closed Liddell power station at Muswellbrook is a prime example. It is intended to capture a share of the Australian and, perhaps, the world market when at this stage over 90 per cent of the world’s solar panels are coming out of China. I wonder why? China has cheap shower, cheap labour, cheap money, no carbon taxes and is already producing 90 per cent of the world’s supply.
Even more challenging for this new investment proposal in Australia is that China produces 97 per cent of the world’s purpose-made silicon for the silicon wafers for PV solar. It’s worth reflecting on that. Originally photovoltaic cells were made out of leftover bits of silicon from other processes. It was China that built these scale factories that have been able to drive the costs down. If Australia were to compete in this space, we would have to build scale factories of this size. We simply would not have the market. The Chinese panels are of world quality. You wouldn’t want to kid yourself. If we are going to round the Chinese up at their own game, they are hardly a soft target. Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute said it was unclear what Australia’s strategic was in solar manufacturing. He said, ‘It’s a bit of a bloodbath commercially.’ He also said:
The growth was enormous. The prices came down dramatically and that wiped out a lot of the companies making panels. I don’t think any of that has changed.
The question is this: it hasn’t worked so far, so why would it be different this time?
It is a good question.
The Productivity Commission has said that this should be retrospectively tested against the national framework test. That’s for good reason. This is exactly what I am talking about here. The government has chosen to back an industry without having a good understanding of how difficult that will be. They are playing to the opposition’s strengths, if you like. I don’t mean this opposition; I mean the business opposition. They could scarcely pick a more unlikely target: the product of the second-biggest economy in the world with few of the self-imposed handicaps that Australia excels in. All governments should be guided by reality, not excessive optimism.
If the government was intent on supporting Australia manufacturing in an agnostic manner and not on their pet project, it would pay for it to concentrate on industries where our chances of success are much higher, such as ensuring we have more gas in the market, carbon capture and storage, and blue hydrogen. But they are all excluded from this bill. Not excluded and much more likely to be a success would be fertilisers or chemical plants to provide independent sovereign capacity for our world-class agricultural system. A good place to start may be the group of companies led by Australian Plant Proteins which planned to build a pulse protein plant processing capacity in South Australia under the Modern Manufacturing Initiative and where they were awarded $113 million. There were going to be three facilities. The South Australian government was putting in $65 million, and industry was putting in $200 million.
Demand for plant based foods globally is booming, and you may well ask why we would build this in South Australia. It’s because we already produce over 25 per cent of legumes in Australia and we have a very reliable climate in the lower north, mid-north and Yorke Peninsula. It was envisaged that we would be able to quadruple that amount, actually, and that is a highly rewarding task for farmers—to be growing in this pulse industry. My guess is that that is a much better proposal than the solar proposal.
Of great concern to me in this legislation is the raid on EFIC, the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, diverting its focus from driving exports to spreading the love locally. To put that in brackets, it’s propping up the Labor vote in their electorates. Worth restating are the original objectives of the EFIC Act: to facilitate and encourage Australian export trade and overseas infrastructure development by providing finance, to encourage banks and other financial institutions to finance exports and overseas infrastructure development, to provide information and advice about finance to help support Australian export trade, to assist other Commonwealth entities and businesses in providing finance and financial services and to administer payments in relation to overseas aid.
This is just a raid on a convenient pile of money, on a convenient source, that will lessen the capacity of EFIC to meet its primary purpose. That alone should be enough to discourage people from supporting this legislation. The Labor Party has a track record in this area. The Howard government established a $2 billion communications fund. It was a future fund like the Future Fund and the medical future fund. It was to provide an ongoing income stream to invest and reinvest in regional telecommunications. It was established in 2005 to ensure people in rural, regional and remote Australia were not left behind. What happened to that? Kevin Rudd was on an aeroplane to Western Australia one day and trying to work out what to do with the internet. He came up with a $4 million plan on the back of a drink coaster that sucked up the $2 billion out of the regional telecommunications fund. It’s just like EFIC. It’s a pile of money there that the Labor Party can’t keep their hands off—kleptomaniacs.
Across the board, Labor are clearly picking winners, preferencing their pet project—100 per cent renewable energy. We all support renewable energy. Everybody in this House would support renewable energy, and in South Australia it’s very popular. In fact, there are 3,597 megawatts of installed capacity of renewable energy in South Australia, with 2,740 of that in my electorate of Grey. There are another 1,300 megawatts on roof tops. But, as I have explained to this House on a number of occasions, South Australia leads the nation in renewable energy, doubling that of the next mainland states. We also lead Australia in the electricity price race. We are 50 per cent higher in our retail than the next highest state in Australia. There’s a complex underlying reason for this. It is not just the renewable energy at faceplate; it is the embedded subsidies that are in our bills, which people cannot see and which are hidden from their view, that are driving South Australia to this higher point.
The reason for me focusing on that, and what it shows is that, governments and all of us Australians need to be fully aware of the actual consequence of legislation, the actual end outcome. I read in the newspaper just recently someone lamenting about the fact that people are being asked to shut off their rooftop solar because there’s too much supply at certain times of the day. They basically said, ‘Well, who would have thought of that?’ They could have read what I said in this place 10 years ago. I thought of it. I don’t blame anyone for chasing the government subsidies—this is what they’ve been told to do—but I said that the concept of rooftop solar in the end is like trying to put water back in the Murray through your garden hose. The system is just not plumbed for it. And now we’ve reached this point of maximum saturation, and the tipping point there becomes the cost of the backup in the renewable system. It’s like a parabola: the higher you go up the scale, the higher the impact costs become. It’s the reason why we need to reach an understanding of the issues and the things that actually drive the markets before we make these investment decisions—
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): The debate is interrupted in accordance with Standing Order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour, and the member will be granted leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.