Prime Minister – Transcript – Remarks, Amazon Fulfilment Centre Opening

Liberal Party of Australia

PRIME MINISTER: It’s great to be here with you, Stuart, and want to thank particularly the Amazon team, particularly those who are right here making all this happen. It’s great to see you here as we moved around the facility today. Can I also acknowledge the Darug people, their elders past and present and emerging. Can I acknowledge any Defence Force personnel who are here today, particularly veterans who are here today. I have no doubt there will be many who will be working in this very Fulfilment Centre as well. To Tricia Hitchen, who I’ve known for many, many years. Thank you for your leadership out here in Western Sydney.

This has been an extraordinary partnership, as Stuart has said, it’s involved so many people. I’m very proud of my team out here in Western Sydney and of course Minister McIntosh, that’s here as the Member for Lindsay, but also Vivek Singha is here with you today, and he is the Liberal candidate for McMahon at the upcoming Federal Election. When you look at this, the biggest one of its kind in the southern hemisphere and you look at the technology that is here, the investment that has gone into it. When you look out and you drive in here and you look at this precinct and you think, what was here a decade ago, or even five years ago, none of it happened by accident. It just didn’t turn up. It required people to have a vision for this area. It required infrastructure to be put in place, whether it’s the roads that circulate around here and provide the base infrastructure for this facility or as indeed, as Stuart Ayres said, it is the Western Sydney Airport, the Nancy Bird Walton airport itself, which has been the catalyst, together with things like the M7 and other major projects, to create what is happening here in Western Sydney. The partnership between federal, state and local government is at its best when it’s doing things like this.

We’re all very focussed on the same goal. And what’s the goal? Jobs, jobs and more jobs. There’ll be 1500 jobs here. There’s over 600 right now. And it was great to chat to those who are working here and find out where they’ve come from. Some of them were working in very different fields to what they are now doing. And as I met and spoke to the employees here, just how excited about they were about the job, that there was a job that was close by. But the catchment for people working here is quite wide. People are driving from Parramatta. They’re only driving from not too far away. And I’m sure further afield as well. But these jobs have been created because we decided that we wanted to unlock the economic opportunities of Western Sydney, and we’ve been doing that as governments now for some time, particularly the partnership between the government I lead and the state government in New South Wales. This is exactly what we wanted to see happen. We wanted to see large companies like Amazon decide that they wanted to come and invest right here and create the opportunities. And when we look at this infrastructure, the private investment has generated off the back of what has been established around here in Western Sydney. What you see in there is the infrastructure of a new economy, bringing some 11,000 small businesses together and giving them the opportunity to connect to customers right across Australia, but indeed well beyond that in other parts of the world.

It is an advanced technology which is putting the Australian economy into the new digital age. The economic plan that we have as a Government, and that is to reduce taxes and cut red-tape to ensure we are investing in skills and infrastructure, to have reliable, affordable energy, to be building our sovereign manufacturing capability, but also to embrace the data and digital economy. And you can see that on display in there. What any small business themselves would find impossible to be able to build for themselves. And here it is. This is the market at work. This is entrepreneurs working together, small businesses, extremely large international businesses like Amazon, facilitated by the infrastructure and the investments that have been wisely put in and planned by governments. There’s a reason why Australia’s economy is coming out of this pandemic stronger than all the advanced economies in the world – the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Italy. There’s a reason for that, because we’ve had a strong economic plan to take us through the pandemic, and all of this was happening during the pandemic. Australia didn’t stop during the pandemic. Yes, on occasions, there were shutdowns here and there. But these investments kept going, because we were determined as governments to make sure they kept going. Our economic plan was all about ensuring that Australia came through the pandemic, the worst recession we’ve seen globally. You know, this global pandemic was 30 times worse economically than the global financial crisis of just over a decade ago. 30 times worse. But our employment outcomes have been 50 per cent better. And one of the reasons for that is the great vote of confidence that Amazon, and many other companies, have had in Australia and in our economy.

And that’s why our economy will continue to grow and be strong into the future. Because the plan we have, a plan borne by our own expertise, and importantly experience working through this pandemic sets us up for the future. I’ve been, I’m not from Western Sydney as Stuart and Melissa know, Trish knows, but gee I love it. And I love it because of the entrepreneurialism. I love it because of its aspiration. I love it because they can just get stuff done. We’re seeing that over the Western Sydney Airport right now, about half the workforce there comes from Western Sydney. We’re seeing it here. I mean, people in Western Sydney are grasping their opportunities. They’re buying homes, they’re starting businesses, they’re investing, they’re backing themselves. And my Government has been all about encouraging that, backing it in, lower taxes and in particular, the support through the infrastructure and services and the fundamental belief that we’ve always had in Western Sydney.

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