The time for made in Australia is now – Tim Ayres in his own words

Australia’s newly minted Assistant Minister for a Future Made in Australia Tim Ayres believes opportunities such as the revitalisation of manufacturing come around rarely. Today is one of those opportunities he argues in this excerpt from his address to the National Manufacturing Summit.

As the Prime Minister said back in April – we need to aim high, be bold and build big to match the size of the opportunity in front of us. We have to get cracking.

Australia has unlimited potential.

But we do not have unlimited time.

If we don’t seize this moment, it will pass.

If we don’t take this chance, we won’t get another.

If we don’t act to shape the future, the future will shape us.

I’d put it this way: the world doesn’t owe Australia a living.

We all have to work for it.

The IMF – it must be said, no great fan of industry policy – noted recently targeted interventions were back everywhere, and particularly in developed economies.

This surge in measures had been driven by the largest economies in the world – China, the European Union and the United States.

A blog by three IMF analysts published in April noted the pandemic, heightened geopolitical tensions and the climate crisis “raised concerns about the resilience of supply chains, economic and national security, and more generally about the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently and address these concerns.”

Governments had come under pressure to do more to deal with existential risk, and to shore up sovereign capability. The blog noted there had been more than 2,500 industrial policy interventions in 2023, and that advanced economies had been more active than emerging markets, which is against the trend of the past ten years. The IMF is always concerned about the risks of misallocated resources.

But it’s clear the global consensus has shifted. Waiting until crisis strikes to address vulnerabilities is in the long run too expensive. Australia needs to build the industrial capability to solve national challenges and bring economic weight, technological capacity, investment and trade to be an effective part of the region of the world in which we live.

To give our people the skills and education required to navigate the challenges, but also to contribute to solving national challenges.

To lift national productivity.

To harness all of our capacity, our national institutions, our people, firms and industry to make Australia more resilient in a region we shape in Australia’s interest.

Of course, the first step to a national response to a more challenging environment is to have an evidence-based approach – to be clear about the nature of the challenge.

To see the world as it is, not how we wish it to be.

That’s politics for you

Our political opponents blinkered by their own ideological predispositions are unable to make a rational assessment of the challenges that will shape Australia’s future.

Some, including in the Greens political party, see the urgency of the twin challenges of climate and energy, albeit with an utterly impractical approach to the policy response for Australia in our region. But they can’t see the security challenge. For them, the rising risk of competition turning to confrontation or conflict is fake news, and any national effort to build effective deterrence anathema.

Others, within the right of our political system, singularly focus on the security challenge but cannot bring themselves to accept the basic facts of physics, technology and economics engaged by the twin climate and energy challenges.

That leaves just Labor, without bipartisanship, to prosecute the national interest challenges, the overlapping questions of how to secure Australia’s position in a more difficult world, where our future can’t be taken for granted.

Or worse still, as I believe it is for Peter Dutton’s Liberals and Nationals, framed entirely through a negative partisan lens.

A lens through which they only see a pathway to victory if they convince Australians that they have clearly lost.

Australia deserves much better.

This Albanese Government is engaging every tool of statecraft to secure a better future for Australia.

More effective defence and deterrence.

Deeper diplomatic engagement in our region and with our partners

Strengthening the resilience, sovereignty and economic growth of the Pacific states with whom we share the Blue Continent

Deeper economic trade and investment in our region through the SEA Economic strategy- building a dense mesh of interconnected trade and investment relationships rather than hub and spoke supply chain models.

Shared approaches to key issues in our region- energy security, emissions reduction, food security and agricultural development

All of this statecraft directed toward our security, as well as economic resilience.

And our statecraft includes industrial policy, too.

A future made in Australia

The biggest pro-manufacturing package in Australian history, the Future Made in Australia agenda:

• $7 billion critical minerals production tax credit
• $6.7 billion tax credit for green hydrogen production
• $1.3 billion for Round 2 of Hydrogen Headstart
• And additional funding for ARENA, support and incentives for battery production, solar cell commercialisation and manufacture.

All in all, the Future Made in Australia announcements in the 24/25 Budget total just under $23 billion over the next 10 years.

When you add to that the work led by my colleague, Minister Ed Husic, principally the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund and the $392 million Industry Growth Programme, and Minister Chris Bowen, with the Capacity Investment Scheme and the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation build, you get a sense of the Albanese Government’s ambition for Australian industry and to secure Australia’s energy future.

It is the biggest, most ambitious pro-manufacturing package by any Australian Government in Australian history.

It is large and ambitious because the national interest demands that it be proportionate to both the scale of the national challenge and to the national efforts led by governments all around the world.

It is neither old school protectionism, nor is it dogmatic neoliberalism.

It is mission focussed on a series of critical national interest questions that will determine whether Australia is safe, economically secure and resilient in a more challenging world.

And it is guided by the National Interest Framework, making sure our agenda is grounded in rigorous analysis, and that our policies are targeted and have the best possible chance of success.

That is the stronger, better future we can shape together for Australia.

But what about Australians themselves, particularly the Australian men and women in the regional and outer suburban communities that I started with?

This is where the desiccated economists amongst us might apply the sterile term “spillover benefits”.

It means manufacturing returns to their communities.

Clean new modern manufacturing in areas of production where Australia can be confident about projecting into export markets around the region and around the world.

With new investment in manufacturing comes good new jobs.

Good jobs that young families can build a quality life around. That communities can count on.

A Future Made in Australia delivers good quality trades apprenticeships and careers for boys and girls at school today in engineering science and technology.

Good jobs with purpose – that contribute to a stronger and more resilient Australia.

Engineers, trades and technical roles for young Australians who will be part of not just a resurgent manufacturing sector, but a vast nation building project – decarbonising our industrial processes, building a secure energy system and conquering technical challenges in new manufacturing that builds national resilience, security and a good life for their communities.

That shapes a future for those outer suburban, industrial and country communities where the economy works to build a good society, not the other way around.

And that has such a profound social and democratic effect. Strengthening society and democracy, in a world where democracy has been in retreat, by honouring the social contract and delivering good jobs and industry with national purpose.

This train leaves the station only once

But it is a train that leaves the station only once.

Australia may have the world’s best mineral resources under the ground – every mineral sought after as the world undergoes this giant industrial transformation. Above the ground: the best solar and wind resources, proximity to the world’s fastest growing markets and a smart, tough and hardworking people.

The only resource we don’t have is time to waste.

No time to waste with partisan self-interest or negative hyper-partisanship.

Certainly not the chaos and torpor that defined the Liberals and Nationals in Government, with all of the disinvestment and loss of national prestige that involved.

I can tell you that I feel this responsibility intensely.

My own life – a very fortunate life indeed – growing up in country NSW and working in Australian manufacturing indelibly impress upon me the value of good jobs education and investment in these communities and how important practical government can be shaping good local outcomes.

My twin assistant ministerial portfolios of Manufacturing and Trade, with the former now shifted to be a responsibility to the Prime Minister on Future Made in Australia, have given me a bird’s eye view of not just the scope of the national challenges that we must address, but also of the community and nation building potential of the Future Made in Australia Act.

I can’t wait to get on with it.

Picture: Tim Ayres