‘Australia can’t afford to sit on the sidelines,’ the PM will say to the Queensland Press Club on Thursday in a speech launching a new green interventionist industry policy.‘Australia can’t afford to sit on the sidelines,’ the PM will say to the Queensland Press Club on Thursday in a speech launching a new green interventionist industry policy.
“Government needs to be more strategic, more sophisticated and a more constructive contributor. We need sharper elbows when it comes to marking out our national interest.” Borrowing and bending a phrase his predecessor Scott Morrison employed to defend the Coalition government’s slow acquisition of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, Albanese will say of shaping the future economy: “It’s always a contest – a race.”
He will foreshadow new legislation – to be titled the Future Made in Australia Act – that he says will serve as the framework for the changed approach, with details to come in next month’s federal budget. He will describe this as coordinating a package of new and existing initiatives to “boost investment, create jobs and seize the opportunity” of an Australian-made future.
Albanese will cite the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act, which contains half a billion dollars in green energy incentives, and the CHIPS Act, which subsidises research and production of semiconductor technology, as key reasons why Australia can no longer continue a level-playing-field approach to industry development and energy transition.
He will say Australia can no longer be “running on the fumes of past economic reforms”, nor government be merely “an observer or a spectator”.