From the Editor

In the 1960s at the peak of Australia’s manufacturing boom 25 per cent of national GDP was generated by people making things.

Today the sector accounts for less than 10 per cent, and looks to be facing another round of challenges as car manufacturing grinds to a halt, the cost of Australian labour and the vast distances from high demand markets causing large international companies to shake their collective heads, and make the hard decisions about viability.

But as Professor Danny Samson from Melbourne’s Faculty of Business and Economics says in one of this edition’s feature stories for Voice, rumours of the death of Australian manufacturing are wildly exaggerated. 

He believes Australian manufacturing still has a place, but it’s likely to be in areas where highly skilled workforces are worth their cost, and smaller, expertly focussed companies produce at the niche end of the market.

Melbourne Physics PhD graduate Dr Craig Smith runs a Canberra based company that develops products incorporating advanced electro-optic technologies for the aerospace market.

Dr Smith says his company’s EOS products are developed through internal research and development programs based on core technologies in software, lasers, electronics, optics, gimbals, telescopes and beam directors, optical coatings and precision mechanisms. 

The company is widely known (in the field) as the largest producer of optical telescopes in the world.

He agrees that factory work is going to be limited in the future because Australian labour costs and conditions are “stupidly” high compared with world prices, so those sort of jobs will continue to go to automation or overseas, as they have been for some time. 

Although prices are going up in China, he says there are still a lot of people in Asia, Africa and the Americas prepared to do this sort of work at budget prices, and that consequently it will be a fair while yet before conditions even out across the world. 

But yes he says, there is scope at the higher and creative end of technology development where a highly educated workforce is still competitive.

The higher end of the market is where universities come in, and as Australia’s largest research organisation the University of Melbourne has a significant opportunity – and responsibility – to build a skilled workforce able to capitalise on those high end and creative opportunities.

With private sector companies no longer able to invest heavily in development, universities become the R&D engines in the Australian economy.

Katherine Smith
Editor