important organisation. In 1986, only $100,000 was provided. This seems to me a niggardly sum requiring re-examination.
Sir, I do not seek to complain about past delay and tardy consideration of industry's requests and proposals for improved facilities. Rather, I am trying to indicate that we should use our experience of the kind of problems with which we have had to deal during years, indeed decades, of uncertainty and speculation about the importance of our manufacturing industry to ensure that we take an enlightened view towards its future and that we seek by all means to assess its possibilities, its problems and their likely solutions.
I think we have tended to take an ad hoc view of industrial development for many years, dealing with problems and needs as they become impossible to ignore. We take pride in reflecting that we do not have an industrial policy as such, a comprehensive record of what we do and intend to do for industry. Whilst production systems and consumer demand were relatively unsophisticated, it was perhaps not necessary to have detailed industrial planning or plans. But times have changed and if we accept that industry continues to be vitally important to our economy, then I suggest that we must have much more information on its performance and its potential than we
have now.
I believe therefore that the Government should now begin the process of updating the 1979 Report of the Advisory Committee on Diversification in order to provide us with a professsional study which will highlight important trends, achievements, needs, problems and supporting facilities relevant to the continued development of an aggressive and efficient manufacturing sector. If this proposed study is felt to be too large in scope then a series of related studies could be carried out to the same end. Coordination is however essential if we are to assist industry to go forward with
confidence.