PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (11:50): I rise to speak on this motion because the debate is not theoretical; it is about whether this country still makes things and whether the people who make these things can afford to keep doing so in this country. Manufacturing is Australia's sixth-largest industry, producing $137 billion of value-added output every year and employing over 930,000 Australians.

It's not in Canberra boardrooms or in the Labor Party room run by the unions but on the factory floors in regional towns, where the local manufacturer is often the largest employer within that district. This is an industry that has transformed itself into a hub of research, capital investment and innovation. Our manufacturers can design, build and scale high-tech, high-value goods using world-class processes with a world-class skilled workforce.

The capacity is here. What is missing is a government willing to back them. Here is the truth this government must acknowledge and confront: you cannot run an advanced manufacturing sector on the back of the highest energy costs in the developed world.

Reliable, affordable base-load power is not a luxury for manufacturers; it is the foundation everything else is built on. Every policy that has driven up energy costs while strangling the development of our own gas and energy resources has made every single one of those 930,000 Australian jobs less secure. This is where I must direct the focus back to the budget this government has just handed down.

Manufacturers were told to expect a cheaper plan for more reliable power. What they got was a $1 billion interest-free loan to help them survive a fuel and supply chain crisis that this government did not see coming—a rescue package dressed up as reform. Industry has already said it plainly: this budget does not provide a clear path to lower industrial costs in the face of rising energy prices.

You do not build sovereign manufacturing capability on emergency loans; you build it on cheaper, reliable power every day, every year, not just when there's a crisis. While this government has spent $18 billion in this budget on net zero initiatives, manufacturers right across regional Australia are paying the price with their power bills. This is a direct result of the last four years of policy that has shut down base-load generation faster than it has been replaced.

A budget serious about manufacturing would have started at the cost of energy. This one didn't. Let's be honest about what regional manufacturers are actually asking for—not a handout, but a level playing field.

They are competing against many substandard imported products that would never pass our own quality and safety standards if they were made in Australia, undercutting local workshops doing the right thing. That is a failure of this government to defend its own industry. That's why this motion calls for a national import quality taskforce to stop substandard foreign dumping at our border.

It's why we're calling for royalty discounts for companies that procure 100 per cent Australian-made products. And it's why we call for an overhaul of the 'Australian Made' logo fees, because it makes no sense that a small regional workshop must pay a premium just to tell the world where the product was built. We don't need to wait for a budget to make these changes.

If this government were serious about backing our manufacturers, they would have taken this action by now. Without policy intervention on energy costs and imported standards, regional manufacturers do not stagnate; they decline permanently. A billion dollars in loans buys an industry a few more months.

It won't buy them a future. This is about national sovereignty as much as it is economics. A country that cannot make its own steel, its own components or its own equipment has handed control of its own future to somebody else.

This budget, by its own government's design, was forced to spend its way out of that very vulnerability—emergency fuel reserves, emergency loans, emergency stockholdings—because the underlying weakness was never fixed. Regional industry are not asking for sympathy or another emergency package the next time there is a global shock; they are asking for a fair fight, affordable energy, honest competition and a government that values what Australia can produce.

I commend this motion to the chamber.