Speaker 1:
It was great to have so many announcements this morning and now the question is how quickly we can move. There’s also been a fair bit of talk about how we build the solutions and build the solutions right here. The Prime Minister said during the election campaign that he wants to build things again in Australia, and now we have an opportunity here directly from the manufacturing workers union themselves. So please welcome to the stage, the National Secretary for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Steve Murphy.
Steve Murphy:
Good day, everyone. I’d like to kick off by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to Elders leaders past and present. I’m Steve Murphy. I’m the national secretary of the AMWU. I’ve been working for the union now for almost 20 years, but be before that, I was a fitter and turner up in Newcastle.
Steve Murphy:
I’d also like to acknowledge Minister Bowen. Six months ago, we would not have been able to have this conversation. We have not been able to get together, and there are some big discussions that are going on all across the country about our economic and our industrial shift that we need to make happen towards a less carbon intensive economy, and that is thanks in part to the actions and the words of Minister Bowen over probably the last nine months.
Steve Murphy:
Which brings me to my first point, and that is that it’s not going to be a just transition if there’s not also a jobs transition. The AMWU represents thousands of workers all across the vehicle industry and various parts of the supply chain. While the previous government and the previous treasure dared Holden to leave and we lost our manufacturers. It doesn’t mean that we lost all of our capability and it doesn’t mean we lost all of our industry. Now we represent workers who are still designing and making suspension and driveline components all the way through to servicing your car and those workers who are beside you on the side of the road when you conk out, and they get you moving again.
Steve Murphy:
They are usually AMWU members and until now their voices have not been heard in this shift from old kinds of engines to new electric vehicles and that’s not been the case in the past. In the ’80s, there was a button car plan where the Senate at the time realized that Australia needed to make some big shifts and it got into the room industry, government and unions to talk about what that was going to look like. And what we were able to do together was we were able to radically reorganize that industry to make it globally competitive and be able to stand on our own two feet, and to be able to look after our local industry and secure those jobs.
Steve Murphy:
And what was learnt during that experience, it was the knowledge, the skills, the expertise, but also the livelihoods of those workers that made that radical reformation of what we did at that point possible, and we can learn from that moment to work out how we’re going to move together in the future.
Steve Murphy:
Now, the political and the investment capital conversations at the moment are about regulation. They’re about finance. They’re about supply, and they’re about marketing. Well, workers experience in this is that this is an industry transition. It’s about technology coming in and what’s happened in the past. For this industry and others is that change usually happens to workers, not with them and what results in that is workers end up with lower skilled, lower paying jobs, less of a career path, or we end up with job losses. And we’ve seen many of our industries transformed in that way, where workers always pay the price for that transition to our economy.
Steve Murphy:
But together we can tread a completely different path. With the right approach, the right engagement and the right participation, we can have a manufacturing led recovery in this country and have a first experience of transitioning away from old forms of fuel into new forms of energy, where we’ve got a positive story to tell for working class people across this country on what it means for us.
Steve Murphy:
Now, I’ll be clear. Our union supports an ambitious worker center transition and a quick one to electric vehicles. We know that it is needed. We know that there is an opportunity to fight global heating and climate change across the world. We know that there’s an opportunity to rebuild our sovereign capability in our vehicle sector, but to also grab hold of the research and development. So much of it that comes from investment in vehicle manufacturing and of course there’s an opportunity to create thousands of good quality, well-paying union jobs all across Australia.
Steve Murphy:
But to realize that opportunity, there are policy questions that obviously need answering. One is around industry policy. One is around jobs policy, and the third one is around skills policy.
Steve Murphy:
On industry policy, this has been a failure for over 30 years. We’ve gone from 30 percent of our GDP being delivered from manufacturing down to almost 6 percent. We rank last in the OACD. When it comes to our manufacturing self sufficiency, we produced 30 percent less than what we consume. Countries like Ireland produced 200 percent of what they consume and we rank 91. I think we fell to 92 recently when it comes to economic complexity around the world, because of what was mentioned earlier.
Steve Murphy:
We are just quick to cash out as soon as we dig something out of the ground and say that we’ve made our contribution. We export iron oil, we export lithium and we import steel and batteries. This transition to electric vehicles is a great opportunity for us, a great opportunity to value add to our minerals, a great opportunity to improve our economic complexity, and to create new industries in the supply chains that will come with it.
Steve Murphy:
And we can carve out a space for ourself in the global supply chains as been experienced in our previous speakers and think about what place we can hold into the future, including the recycling of those materials, including the batteries that we use in those cars.
Steve Murphy:
But if we got a plan, we can move something forward and that is rather than importing these components and importing these things, we can start to retrofit, which is already happening around the country, pulling out diesel engines, retrofitting electric vehicles. We can start to assemble those electric vehicles in Australia when we get to that critical mass where we’re able to get people confident that whether they’re purchasing something, we can move to manufacturing.
Steve Murphy:
But ultimately for us to be a green manufacturing superpower, and as part of that we need and we should build Australian-made vehicles here again.
Steve Murphy:
Secondly, we need a jobs policy. We are thrilled that we had the government come out and say that they are committed to creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs all across the manufacturing industry. It’s great to say the words, but after you say the words, you got to do the deeds, right? You need the policy to make sure that this happens.
Steve Murphy:
The way to make that happen is developing and supporting our small to medium enterprises all across Australia, whether that’s in the supply chains of electric vehicles or the downstream of that, that is our chance to create many of those good quality decent jobs, and turn our small enterprises into medium ones and turn our medium enterprises into large ones.
Steve Murphy:
Now workers are facing transition in many industries, particularly in our energy and mining regions all across Australia, and they’re experiencing right now an industrial transformation, which is their first experience and that is going to be tested by the kinds of jobs that we create for those workers to shift to in the future.
Steve Murphy:
Their experience at the moment is that they don’t want to bolt solar panels onto a roof. That is not a job that is meaningful to them to go from a job that is well paid looks after their security to go to something is very low paid and have doesn’t have any job security, and they would likely have to move and start to break up their family. They want decent jobs in their own community that pay around the same rates of pay, and they want to be able to watch their kids and their grandkids grow up where they grew up.
Steve Murphy:
And we can attract and retain these workers with decent jobs, with good pay, with safe workplaces, and with a secure future if we get the policy settings right.
Steve Murphy:
Last one is skills and training. Now training for workers so far in the automotive industry has been really linked to the OEM manufacturers, and that is that the skills that they learn is how to part fix a particular vehicle, and what happens as a result of that is workers get tied to that employer only, which means you can’t shift or go anywhere else.
Steve Murphy:
Our early experience in the shift to EVs is that it is becoming very quickly and workers are feeding back to us is a degradation of skills. No longer are we pulling apart and using all of our mechanical abilities, it’s simply a fault finding or a bolt in bolt exercise.
Steve Murphy:
Of course, the exception for that is in Victoria, where the state government has partnered with industry and with unions to build the skills and work with TAFE to build the skills of bus mechanics. So they’ve got a skill set that is recognized, portable, and they actually feel like the work that they are doing is valued and they’re being recognized for that and they can take those skills all across the industry.
Steve Murphy:
So we need a plan, a plan for the skills that we need right now, a plan for the skills that we need into the future, but mostly we need a plan for opportunities for young people to get an apprenticeship and a career in this industry so that they can see it out and hopefully retire from the same industry that they started working in.
Steve Murphy:
Now, of course, a rapid change of this size requires some coordination. It requires governments at all three levels. It requires a whole host of different government departments and a whole host of different ministries. It requires coordination amongst employers, amongst capital investment training providers, climate activists, researchers in university, and of course, unions as well.
Steve Murphy:
And today, we are calling on the federal government to establish a [inaudible 00:09:51] National Innovation Council for the electric vehicle sector. We want everybody to be pulling in the same direction to make sure that we can move this and move it quickly. We’re saying that its task should be to generate and coordinate a plan, a just plan for a future that is made in Australia.
Steve Murphy:
A transition to electric vehicles doesn’t happen without the workers that my union and other unions, including the electrical trade union, represent. We know that a [inaudible 00:10:19] approach at a national level is the way to make sure that this change happens quickly, but also in a way that brings workers along for the journey. And we’re looking forward to working with all of you for climate action and for job creation. Thank you.