ROY GREEN. Australia’s Manufacturing Future. Part 2 of 2

Apr 17, 2020

The framework for a national industrial strategy can draw with great benefit from the experience of other countries, but it is important to recognise that such a strategy should also be adapted to the specific conditions and prospects of the Australian economy.

There is no one-size-fits-all model for industrial transformation. The following are five basic and by no means exhaustive building blocks for success.

First, we must overcome the fragmentation and under-resourcing of institutional policy-making in Australia. Funding for research and innovation, for example, is spread haphazardly over 13 portfolio areas and 150 budget line items. A new National Industrial Strategy Commission should be established to develop national priorities in consultation with industry sectors, aimed at growing “industries of the future” with new technologies and business models.

The initial task of this Commission would be to undertake a “knowledge foresight” to identify areas of current and future competitive advantage for Australia, as well as gaps and opportunities in domestic supply chains. This means addressing not just areas of market failure but “system failure”, where coordination, targeting and evaluation of publicly funded programs is lacking, more often than not due to path dependency.

Second, there has been a longstanding, widely acknowledged need to deepen collaboration between industry and research organisations, possibly around designated “national missions”. This will require an immediate reversal of the decline in both government and business expenditure on research and innovation, now far below the OECD average at 1.79 per cent of GDP, and still falling against the trend elsewhere.

It will also require funding agencies to address the research mismatch between industry and universities. Recent data indicate that while funding is relatively abundant for health and medical research, enabling Australia to grow a world competitive “medtech” and pharmaceutical sector, it is hopelessly inadequate for engineering and information technology, which is essential for more broadly based manufacturing.

Moreover, other advanced economies make use of semi-autonomous agencies to coordinate and mobilise innovation and industry support, such as Tekes in Finland and Enterprise Ireland. But Innovation and Science Australia, which could have been the industry-facing agency to do so, was fatally compromised from the start by a bureaucratic circling of the wagons, particularly as political interest also waned. A major rethink is overdue.

Third, we should not overlook the contribution of entrepreneurial startups to economic recovery and renewal, including integration of the digital and physical dimensions of manufacturing, which is a key feature of Industry 4.0. Governments everywhere facilitate startup activity, as well as scaling up new ventures for global opportunities, through support for innovation precincts in cities and regions.

This is where the division of responsibilities between Commonwealth and States becomes relevant, currently a microcosm of system failure. While the Commonwealth’s role is to establish a robust, properly funded national policy framework, the States should carry much of the responsibility for delivering business services and infrastructure, particularly for industry clustering and place-making initiatives.

Fourth, the Government can also make a big difference for small and medium enterprises with public procurement policy. Too often we see local tenders overlooked in favour of large international companies on a narrow “value for money” basis, when these large companies themselves might owe their existence to another country’s more imaginative procurement policy.

Measures like the US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program are a powerful instrument for enterprise capability-building and the development of critical mass in local supply chains. They can also supplement foreign direct investment attraction programs, when these are designed, as they should be, to enhance research intensive manufacturing at home.

While infrastructure is a topic for another time, we should not overlook the importance of an efficient freight and ports system in facilitating increasingly data-driven operations in manufacturing logistics and supply chains. As Infrastructure Australia has recently noted, our trading connectivity would be enhanced by a new East Coast deep-water container port able to accommodate the global shift to ultra-large container vessels.

Fifth and finally, industrial transformation in Australia will depend ultimately on the adequacy of our workforce and management skills. The international evidence suggests that these skills are lagging other comparable countries, and that if anything they are atrophying further with the decline of manufacturing and the myriad of related services which contribute to economic complexity.

Hence, education and training must be a key element of industrial strategy, along with provision to draw on workers’ talent and creativity at the enterprise level. Again it is clear from the evidence that involving workforces in the range of decisions that affect them contributes to superior productivity performance, so why wouldn’t we encourage this practice, or even mandate it?

Most immediately, substantial public funding will be needed to repair the damage to the TAFE system from market contestability, and to place vocational education and training at the heart of the strategy to rebuild manufacturing capability. This applies as well to the Covid-19 hit to university revenues. Unfortunately, the Government’s otherwise welcome announcement to maintain funding for domestic students will not compensate for this loss of international student revenues.

It is still not well understood that Commonwealth funding for higher education does not cover the real cost of domestic teaching, let alone research. Uniquely in Australia, international student income not only cross-subsidises teaching, but also makes up a significant proportion of research funding as well. The loss of this income will seriously damage the capacity of Australia’s university sector to contribute to long-term growth and jobs.

Repositioning for the future

To sum up, while the Government’s dramatic intervention to safeguard people’s lives and livelihoods in the current crisis is clearly justified, it is also increasingly evident that the time has come for a thorough-going reassessment and rebalancing of Australia’s industrial structure. This will require the design and implementation of a comprehensive national industrial strategy.

Understandable concern has already been expressed that the emergency rescue package entails an unprecedented level of public debt. So how can the Government commit to even greater expenditure on such an ambitious new policy direction? Historically, this problem has always accompanied the recovery from wars and crises, but it is a problem which has always had a straightforward solution – a return to economic growth and productivity.

The challenge of this crisis is to devise a growth path which doesn’t simply replicate what came before, but also addresses the broader issues of climate change and social inequality in conjunction with the imperative of technological change and innovation. The case being made here is that to succeed in this challenge means creating a more dynamic, sustainable and inclusive knowledge-based economy, with a major role for advanced manufacturing.

There will be those who claim that Australia cannot afford to undertake such a radical and untried repositioning of its conventional policy approach. The response must be that we cannot afford not to do so, particularly at this critical turning point for the world’s production systems and supply chains. We may not be able to rewrite our history, but wouldn’t we want to be ready to shape the future before it shapes us?

Professor Roy Green is Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub. This article first appeared as a discussion starter for the Australian Manufacturing Forum @AuManufacturing

 

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