ADJOURNMENT
Mr ABDO (Calwell) (16:30): One of the reasons I'm in this House is that I believe passionately in Australia's manufacturing future—in the idea that a strong nation makes things, builds things and backs its people to do it. The pandemic taught us a brutal lesson. If we think we can prosper as a nation without our own sovereign manufacturing capability, if we think we can just rely on global supply chains and hope everything will be okay, we're fooling ourselves.
When the world shut down, we saw how fragile things really were. Shelves were empty, supply chains buckled, and industries that once anchored our economy were allowed to wither. That didn't happen by accident.
It was the legacy of neglect and the deliberate undoing of Australian industry by those opposite. For that long, miserable close to a decade, the Liberals turned their backs on Australian manufacturing. They shut down our car industry.
They stripped away industry programs. In the last election, they even campaigned to defund the National Reconstruction Fund, the very vehicle designed to rebuild our sovereign industrial capability. They have never believed in Australian industry, let alone had a plan to make it more innovative, productive or resilient.
Instead they spent their years in government locked in an endless internal war over climate and energy policy. And what was the result? It was 22 discarded climate and energy policies, one after another, leaving industry paralysed, investors uncertain and our energy system weaker than ever.
Good policy and stable policy, backed by a vision that backs Australian industry and Australian workers, matters. It's the foundation that gives business the confidence to invest in industrial decarbonisation and energy efficiency, in new technologies and in the renewable energy infrastructure that will power our future. That stability never came under the Liberals.
They wasted a decade. In fact, they did worse than that; they actively helped destroy Australian industry that delivered for Australian jobs. It was a decade of underinvestment in innovation, of stripping investment from our nation-building energy projects and of missed opportunities for regions, where jobs are concentrated in heavy industry.
Today they still can't agree on even the basics—on whether climate change is real, let alone how to seize the opportunities of a changing world. And then, without any sense of self-awareness, we get the leader of the National Party in this place today putting forward an MPI that talks about—what? About the devastation of industries and manufacturing across Australia.
You can't make this stuff up. He should take that to the coalition party room. Labor is governing with purpose.
We're rebuilding our industrial strength, through the $22.7 billion Future Made in Australia agenda, the Industry Sector Plan and new investments like the Net Zero Fund and the Green Iron Investment Fund, to give heavy industry the certainty it needs to transform and thrive, because a strong manufacturing sector and a strong climate policy go hand in hand. We can't reach net zero without industry and we can't build a strong economy without the jobs, skills and capabilities that manufacturing delivers.
That's why Labor is rebuilding the foundations of this nation with secure jobs, sovereign capability and a future made in Australia by Australians for Australians. I want to raise another matter here today. It has been reported that SBS has instructed its editorial staff not to use the word 'Palestine' in news stories, despite this government taking the historic step of recognising the State of Palestine.
In contrast, fellow public broadcaster the ABC has updated its own policies. It's a position shared by the global majority of UN states. SBS, a multicultural, multilingual, national public broadcaster no less, an institution which Australians are rightly proud of, which considers itself the home of Australian multiculturalism and which is meant to be promoting and contributing to our social cohesion, has actively chosen to pursue a hardline editorial approach—an interventionist, activist approach.
Multiculturalism is more than just cuisine and costumes. If multiculturalism stops at the buffet table, then it's not inclusion; it's performance. The news should be as it is.