Labor told to be bold in manufacturing rebuild

Labor has a rare opportunity to give Australian manufacturing the attention it needs by designing bold capability and capacity policies with runways of a decade or more, according to those at the cutting edge of the sector.

The new government has promised billions in new investments but is being urged to look beyond election cycle grant programs and address the unique challenges facing the local sector in the wake of major manufacturers exiting the country.

“What we lost when we lost the end of car production here was a whole bunch of jobs and capability,” Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC) chief executive David Chuter said.

“But what we really lost was a structure inside the manufacturing sector whereby you have a handful of really big companies at the top, who drive hundreds of other suppliers through tiered layers of supply chain to be better than they thought they could be and to take a handful of those out into the global world.”