PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr LAXALE (Bennelong) (11:36): I rise to support this motion and commend the government's Future Made in Australia agenda. To do that, I'd like to give you an example close to home for me, right in Bennelong. Macquarie Technology Group operates in the heart of my electorate in Macquarie Park and is a perfect example of what our Future Made in Australia agenda is actually delivering.
The government's $200 million hybrid note investment in Macquarie Technology Group will keep critical digital infrastructure and the data of everyday Australians securely onshore. The company currently employs around 450 locals, and this investment is expected to create an additional 140 high-skilled jobs in digital infrastructure. It's an important business in my own community, and this investment keeps skilled jobs and sovereign capability and data here in Australia rather than overseas.
It's a great example of what our entire FMIA agenda is built on. Over the past decade, wars, trade disruption and supply shocks have exposed just how fragile supply chains really are. During the pandemic, we didn't have what we needed.
When prices spike during global conflict, Australian families and businesses feel it directly. When supply chains seize up, it is our manufacturers, our workers and our families who wear the cost of this. We've learnt the hard lesson from that period.
Countries are stronger when they can make more of what they need themselves. We have the workers, we have the resources, we have the energy and we have the ideas that the world is looking for. This government has turned all those strengths and all those ideas into jobs and investment.
It's building supply chains that can withstand the next shock. We don't need to make everything here to be stronger, but we need to back the capabilities that matter most to our security and to our economy: renewable and reliable energy, critical minerals processing, green metals, defence industries and advanced digital technology. The positive results of this policy extend all over Australia.
More than 35,000 jobs are supported today at metals-processing facilities and across the supply chains connected to them in the Hunter, Gladstone, Mount Isa, Port Pirie, Hobart and Whyalla. At Tomago, the Albanese and Minns Labor governments are working together, investing $2½ billion to secure the future of the aluminium smelter. That investment protects more than 1,000 jobs onsite and another 5,000 across the Hunter.
At Whyalla, the government has stepped in to maintain operations and keep sovereign steel-making capability in Australian hands. None of this happens by accident. It happens because this government chooses to back Australian industry rather than dare them to go offshore just like the Liberals and Nationals did with our car-making industry a decade or so ago.
At the centre of this choice is the National Reconstruction Fund and $15 billion. To date, it has announced 31 investments totalling nearly $2 billion across resources, biotech, artificial intelligence, food and beverage manufacturing, housing and quantum development. Macquarie Technology Group is one of them.
Energy policy sits at the heart of all of this. Wind, solar, storage and gas are all Australian assets, and they should work for Australians first. We've just announced another policy in this space with the domestic gas reservation.
We just need to compare that record to the alternative on offer. Under the coalition, energy was an afterthought. They had 22 policies and didn't land one.
Four gigawatts left the electricity system, and only one gigawatt came in. Usually, when energy leaves the system, you need to have a plan to replace it, right, because we're only going to use more and more energy as we electrify. But the coalition had no plan.
Twenty-four out of the nation's 28 coal fired power stations announced their closure on their watch, and there was not a single plan to replace that capacity. Now they are promising to scrap Rewiring the Nation and to abolish the National Reconstruction Fund. Their alternative is a fantasy.
Nuclear power is the slowest and most expensive form of energy available to us today. If you think the coalition are bad, One Nation offer no better answer. They claim to speak for working people whilst campaigning against the industries those workers depend on.
Labor fights to keep industry open, and we want to keep businesses like Macquarie Technology Group in Bennelong firing and delivering for our people.