Australian Industry Participation Plan

The essence of this motion is to recommend a new layer of bureaucracy which is supposedly going to be the magic potion to protect and stimulate manufacturing. In the member's dream world, there is a requirement that all major resource projects have an Australian Industry Participation Plan. This is a bad idea which goes in the wrong direction. What we need in Australia are policies which stimulate economic activity in the private sector rather than try to pick winners in any particular industry or sector.

 What is the first thing that any sensible government should do to achieve this objective? It is to do no harm. Yet we have seen the precise opposite of that from the Rudd-Gillard government. We have seen a determination to impose a cost burden on Australian industry which, through the imposition of a carbon tax, makes it uncompetitive with competitors based in other nations around the world. What have people in the manufacturing sector to say about this carbon tax? Mr Lindsay Partridge, the managing director of Brickworks, had this to say:

The end result will be an exodus of manufacturing industries and investment offshore, jobs will be lost, the cost of housing will increase and there will be no change to carbon emissions.

We have also seen increasing rigidities in the labour market under this government's legislation, which bears the Orwellian title of Fair Work Act. 'Do no harm' should be the first principle of government, but this government has been enthusiastically doing everything it can to interfere with the productive operation of Australian industry. What are they now suggesting? They are suggesting Australian Industry Participation Plans. What a useless piece of window dressing! I speak with some direct experience, because in the telecommunications sector in 1997 a requirement was imposed for carrier industry development plans. This emerged from the very same worthy impulse that government can make things better by imposing the requirement for a plan. I was a senior executive at Optus for eight years. I had accountability for the production of the industry development plan, and I assure you that it was a useless waste of time. It was time-consuming, costly and cumbersome and made not one bit of difference to the very considerable contributions made to industry development by Optus and other companies in the telecommunications sector.

So, despite the best instincts of the member for Throsby to engage in well-meaning government intervention—nice pieces of paper to be filled out in an earnest and worthy way—the experience is that these kinds of measures make absolutely no difference. This point was accepted by the Productivity Commission when in 2001 it recommended repeal of the completely useless industry development plan regime. One can only imagine the horror with which the Productivity Commission would view the recommendation contained in this motion by the member for Throsby.

What would be a more sensible direction for us to pursue in order to promote economic activity and ensure that the benefits of the resources boom are captured as widely as possible? Being charitable, I am prepared to concede that this intention underlies this manifestly ill-conceived motion brought forward this evening by the member for Throsby. An excellent recent report by Port Jackson Partners entitled Earth, fire, wind and water: economic opportunities and the Australian commodities cycle says:

… the opportunities and benefits of the commodities boom can accrue more broadly than is commonly understood.

They recommend an approach which is focused on building capacity and enabling growth by:

accelerating and streamlining development processes and enacting other supportive policies—

such as a—

less expansive fiscal policy—

I do not hear much support for that from the government benches—and by appropriate tax policies and by the:

encouragement of foreign investment …

Let us do sensible things to encourage manufacturing rather than implement another earnest and useless bureaucratic measure.