Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Amendment (Local Industry Preference) Bill 2026

Ms LE (Fowler) (10:11): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. Australia was built in its factories, its workshops, its fabrication yards and its cutting rooms. The men and women who worked them did not just make things—they made this country.

And I am proud to present the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Amendment (Local Industry Preference) Bill 2026, because that industry is still here, still employing Australians and still worth fighting for. Many of these businesses were built on the shoulders of migrants and refugees—people who arrived with very little and who could not always speak the language, but who could work, who learned a trade, employed their neighbours, and stitched themselves into the fabric of this nation one weld, one garment, one small business at a time.

I know that story well. It is the story of my community in Fowler. And, in many ways, it is my own.

Let me begin with a number. $22.7 billion. That is what this government committed in the 2024-25 budget, over a decade, to its future made in Australia agenda.

It is in the budget papers. It is in the Treasurer's own press release. It is repeated in speech after speech in this very chamber.

And yet, not a single dollar of that $22.7 billion has been directed to the industries that should sit at the very heart of a future made in Australia: our domestic manufacturers—the steel fabricators, the textile workers and the clothing and footwear makers. It has gone instead to green hydrogen, to critical minerals and to renewable energy technology. Those may well be the industries of tomorrow, but I rise today for the industries that were built yesterday and that still have a future, if only we choose to give them one.

This government loves the phrase "a future made in Australia." We hear it in media releases and advertisements about it, but a slogan is not a strategy and a headline is not a factory. So, I ask the government the questions the people of Fowler ask me: Where is the money? Where are the projects?

Where is the Australian steel this future is supposedly built from? From where I stand—and from where the small manufacturers of south-west Sydney stand—this looks like another Labor slogan, another announcement dressed up as action. The party that once called itself the party of the worker now headlines 'made in Australia', while the workshops that actually make things in Australia are left to close their doors.

I have spoken before about Mario and Sons Steel Fabrication, in my electorate of Fowler—a family business, local workers who are meeting every Australian standard we ask of them. Their story is the story of our whole domestic steel industry—fabricators priced out, structurally, by mass imports from countries whose labour laws are laxer, whose taxes are lighter and whose environmental obligations are far lower than ours.

Against that, our manufacturers cannot win on price alone. And right now, that is exactly what we ask them to do. And it is not just steel.

The Australian Fashion Council has laid the numbers plainly before us. Australia imports around 1.4 billion units of clothing a year. Ninety-seven per cent of what we wear is made offshore because it is cheaper and affordable.

Yet this sector still contributes $2.6 billion a year and supports more than 28,000 manufacturing jobs—53 per cent of them held by women. The Commonwealth itself has spent $790 million procuring textiles, clothing and footwear since 2022, with no consistent measure of how much was Australian made. No requirement.

No benchmark. No accountability. The so-called 'value for money' test structurally shuts out the local maker who cannot match offshore labour costs.

We have built a system that sends Australian making offshore—and we call it good governance. When this government recognises an industry as strategically vital, it acts. It has committed up to $2.3 billion to keep our two remaining oil refineries running to 2030—for fuel security, for sovereign resilience.

So let me ask: if a refinery is worth $2.3 billion because its closure threatens our security, what does it say when we let an entire manufacturing industry quietly collapse? What does it mean when Australia cannot clothe its own defence personnel without a supply chain that is 97 per cent offshore? The Future Made in Australia Act already contains, in its Economic Resilience and Security Stream, the framework for exactly this intervention.

Australian manufacturing meets that test. It always has. The only question is whether the government has the will to say so.

And to anyone who calls this impractical, I think we can take a look at what the Minns government has done. They've just legislated a minimum 30 per cent weighting in tenders for local content, local jobs, and local businesses. If a state can do it, there's no principled reason why the Commonwealth cannot.

And I would like to congratulate the state for taking this step. My bill provides the mechanism. It amends the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 to make supporting Australian industry and local jobs an objective of Commonwealth procurement.

It requires domestic manufacturers to be considered ahead of non-domestic manufacturers for specified projects, with at least 30 per cent of the value of goods made here—and limited, transparent exemptions, because rules without flexibility are not sound policy. That 30 per cent is a demand anchor—it lets a manufacturer invest in their people and their capacity, knowing a fair slice of the Commonwealth's own market is open to them.

RMIT modelling of equivalent reform in textiles alone projects a $641 million economic uplift and more than 950 new skilled jobs over five years for our local manufacturing and our local people. Where there is a will, I believe there is a way. This government found a way for the oil refineries.

This bill simply asks it to find a way for the people who built this country with their hands—many of them migrants, many of them refugees, all of them Australian. If this government truly believes in a future made in Australia, then back it. Not with another slogan—but with a share of the work, a fair go at the tender, and the dignity of knowing that the country they helped build has not forgotten them.

I commend this bill to the House. The SPEAKER: Is the motion seconded?