Sandy Plunkett’s lament in the Australian Financial Review (15/5) over Ed Husic’s sacking as federal industry minister captures a familiar truth: innovation ministries in Canberra are often burial grounds for political ambition. Husic’s fall may have been sealed by factional headwinds, but the deeper problem is that “innovation” in Australia is rarely allowed to mean what it should.

Husic’s departure marks the third time in four decades a capable minister — first Barry Jones, then Malcolm Turnbull, now Husic — has been politically punished for daring to take innovation seriously. That’s not just bad luck, it’s structural.

Australia’s policy machinery has long favoured “the economy we have” over “the economy we need”. And the economy we have is overwhelmingly shaped by three entangled dependencies: property development, resource extraction and short-term migration-fed consumption growth. Real innovation policy — building sovereign capability, backing advanced manufacturing, supporting genuine R&D — threatens all three. So it is sidelined.

What do we call “innovation” in Australia today? Often, it’s little more than glossy brochures for start-ups, rhetoric-heavy grants schemes, and occasional visits to high-tech precincts that are dwarfed in scale and vision by their counterparts in South Korea, Germany or the Netherlands.

This problem isn’t unique to Labor. The Coalition’s “ideas boom” under Turnbull fizzled not because Australians rejected innovation per se, but because its language — tech-driven disruption, entrepreneurship, agile policy — sounded imported and elite, not inclusive or place-based.

Yet Labor faces a particular contradiction. It campaigns with populist appeals to care work, community jobs and public investment (all essential), while promising a “Future Made in Australia” vision of industrial renewal and green-tech supremacy. These are not incompatible goals – but they require deep, sustained innovation policy, not just industry policy with a green tinge.

Replacing Husic with Senator Tim Ayres signals a shift from a tech-focused minister to a traditional manufacturing unionist. That need not be regressive – if Ayres can marry industrial experience with a modern innovation agenda. But it must go beyond factional loyalty or supply-side nostalgia.

It must mean asking: Why does Australia rank 91st on Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index? Why are we one of the few advanced economies without a coherent mission-driven innovation framework? Why does public R&D funding continue to fall as a share of GDP? We don’t just need new ministers. We need new institutional ambition.

The government could start by establishing an independent Australian Innovation Council with teeth – like Finland’s SITRA or the UK’s former Industrial Strategy Council. It could build innovation mandates into public procurement, reform the broken research-commercialisation pipeline, and scale strategic investments in national capability – not just start-ups but mid-sized firms, co-operatives, and public enterprises too.

Husic’s exit should not be the end of the story. It should be the start of a long-overdue reckoning with how we fund, organise and govern innovation in a nation that likes to think of itself as clever – but too often chooses comfort over courage.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.