Unions are calling on the government to back local manufacturing in order to move away from a reliance on China.

Australian Workers’ Union National Secretary Daniel Walton told Ray Hadley politicians are failing to support Australia’s manufacturing industry.

“If we lose these industries, they won’t come back.

“All these operations are going to do is set up overseas in China and they’re going to import the products back because we still need them to make all of our critical infrastructure in Australia.

“We did some recent maintenance on the Harbour Bridge … we imported $4 million of steel from Italy, half a million dollars of concrete from Malaysia, $1.2 million of weldable products from the United States.”

Ray said the stats are “absolutely startling”.

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