Perth Voice Interactive

BEING in the heart of the capital city of the state most critical to delivering prime minister Anthony Albanese vision of a green-powered manufacturing Mecca has its advantages when it comes to Budget time, according to Perth Labor MP Patrick Gorman.

“If you think about the big net zero transformation the world’s going to go through, there’s no country you’d rather be in than Australia, there’s no state you’d rather be in than Western Australia, and there’s no electorate you’d rather be in than Perth,” Mr Gorman told the Voice on Wednesday.

It followed federal treasurer Jim Chalmers handing down his third Budget on Tuesday, included a $22.7 billion package for Mr Albanese’s centrepiece Future Made in Australia program which aims to crank up local manufacturing and attract green energy investment.

Mr Gorman said the “entirety” of Future Made was developed after extensive consultation in WA during the PM’s regular trips across the Nullarbor.

“We were talking about some of this when the prime minister was over last week; it’s about us saying that we don’t want to be looking back in 10 years time saying ‘why have all the jobs gone somewhere else, why aren’t we manufacturing high-tech electrolysers for creating hydrogen?’

“We’re saying ‘let’s do it all here’.

“That means billions of dollars into the new economy that is going to dominate the skyline of Perth,” Mr Gorman said.

He outlined a future where the headquarters of green energy companies would push the state’s fossil-fuel companies into the background.

“WA and Perth can be that kind of financial hub, to bring together the capital, bring together the skills and technology, and then soon, I really hope we start to be that exporter of those new energy products that people want to see.”

Mr Gorman also pointed to $566 million allocated to Geoscience Australia to map Australia’s critical minerals and water resources, but wasn’t going to be drawn on whether that could be leveraged to get better royalties deals out of miners.

“We’ve got great expertise in extracting critical minerals, but we recognise that when government comes to the party, and we can help invest in value-adding, that means we’ve got high-value products, more jobs here in Australia; that means more tax revenue on the employment side, more tax revenue on the company side, and that’s where we see the future,” he said.

The Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA welcomed the $22.7 Future Made package and its $7m for processing critical minerals.

Chamber CEO Rebecca Tomkinson said the budget’s strong position owed a lot to $5.5 billion in additional company tax receipts, with WA’s resources sector leading the way.

She said the chamber was pleased to see initiatives it had recommended such as tax incentives for critical minerals and support to help hydrogen producers reach commercialisation taken up in the Budget.

“Recommendations for unlocking investment were at the heart of CME’s federal pre-Budget submission, so it’s positive to see the government has paid attention to exploration’s role in developing the pipeline of resources projects that will support the energy transition,” Ms Tomkinson said.

Timely

“We need to ensure that the work being done to improve the identification of resources deposits is complemented by fit-for-purpose policies and frameworks to develop those opportunities in a timely and efficient way.

“When the WA resources sector is strong and competitive, it has a positive flow-on effect for the Australian economy and community.”

Mr Gorman was also keen to spruik the government’s $300 energy bill relief and tax cuts, which he said will see 96,000 people in the electorate get a tax cut on July 1.

“What I’ve been hearing in the electorate, week-on-week-on-week when I’ve been out door knocking, is that people are doing it tough,” he said.

“The other one that I think is really exciting for Perth is the number of people who are going to see their HECS debt go down, rather than up, and that’s 24,953 people.”

The budget also extended free TAFE courses, but Mr Gorman doesn’t believe a future workforce will be more motivated to take up quick TAFE qualifications rather than expensive but more critical university qualifications.

“One of the big ideas in the universities review that underpins all of these pieces we’ve done is that actually, our higher education ecosystem all works together. 

“Sometimes you’ll have these hard delineations of ‘Tafe is for this and university is that’, but they’re both now in the the high technology age, they’re both fantastic parts of that broader higher education system.”

“So some people might go and do Tafe first, and then into higher education. We’ve also got people who go into higher education, then go through our Tafe system.”

by STEVE GRANT