OPENING REMARKS | GMC 2026 TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT | GEELONG

Thank you for that introduction Thys – that made me feel older than I felt when I woke up this morning.

I mean, we’re all local members first, and it’s really been an honour and privilege of my life to be able to represent the community that I’ve spent almost the entirety of my life in. And I very much feel that today.

Can I acknowledge the Wadawurrung people, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to elders past and present.

Can I thank the Geelong Manufacturing Council for putting on the summit and for all that it does, and acknowledge Thys and, through Thys, everyone at the Geelong Manufacturing Council and indeed, all the distinguished guests in the room.

Can I acknowledge, of course, Tim Ayres, our Minister for Industry and a really close friend of mine, and it’s fantastic to have Tim here in Geelong. This is an important place for an Industry Minister to come, and it’s a thrill for me to be able to show my hometown to Tim.

Can I acknowledge Libby Coker – of course, my partner in the member for Corangamite – and Chris Couzens, the State Member for Geelong –  great to have you here as well.

Throughout my time in politics, I have been making an argument, and people like Tim have been making arguments, that manufacturing is fundamentally important to our future, not so much in terms of resilience or sovereignty, but just in terms of prosperity. Where goes maternity goes prosperity. And there is not a modern economy in the world which doesn’t have, as a foundation, manufacturing.

I often talk about the Harvard Index of Economic complexity, which in some ways is a measure of modernity. It measures the most complex, high tech manufacturing, complex service economies at one end, and I guess, the most basic kind of agrarian economies at the other, and when you look at that, it is almost an index of modernity – not quite – but we have been steadily falling down that for decades.

But if you look at the top countries like Japan, like Singapore, like Korea, all of them, Germany, have a heavy manufacturing base.

And to me, the great challenge, almost the great micro economic reform challenge of our nation today, is to make our economy more complex. We are a heavily primary industry based economy, which is to say nothing bad about primary industry. In fact, the opposite right now. It’s the hope and decide. But we need to be more than mining and we need to be more than agriculture, as much as they are critically important to our economy, and it’s why manufacturing is so important for us to focus on going forward.

Now I would make an argument, and forgive me for being partisan, that over the journey, I do think labor governments have been more focused on this than the coalition. And I do think that when you look at the period, particularly between 2013 and 2022, we saw a significant de-industrialisation of the country.

But it would also be fair to say that if you took a step back and just looked at the journey over the last few decades, the point that Thys has made is fundamentally right – we have seen a significant reduction in manufacturing as a proportion of our GDP. In fact, I think that peaked in around the early 70s, at the same time which would have peaked the proportion of the labor force that were engaged in manufacturing.

And that would resonate with our own story in Geelong. If you think about Ford, someone will correct me, I’ll probably get this number wrong, but it was thousands of people who worked at Ford in the early 70s. I think it was around 4000 at the time that Ford closed in 2016, there was about 900 people working there.

So actually, we’d already seen a significant shrinkage in that workforce, and some of that was to do with technology, but a lot of it was to do with a shift in our economy away from manufacturing, and one that, you know, a number of us, and Tim has very much been at the forefront of this, have been arguing we need to turn around.

From there we have the pandemic, which really, I think, changed the discussion across the country in a significant way. I mean, suddenly defence was literally engaged in making masks, and we were looking at supply chains across the country, how they could be reconfigured based on how global supply chains were being profoundly disrupted.

When we came to government in 2022, we were deeply focused on seeking to reinvigorate manufacturing within our national economy, based on where we saw the manufacturing of the future, jobs of the future, the industries of the future.

And the National reconstruction Fund, which Tim oversees, is really our main initiative in that respect. And we have seen significant steps taken forward in terms of the government’s Future Made in Australia agenda.

But then we also have what’s occurred in the last two months, and segue for a moment into defence. We have been arguing for a long time that Australia’s most consequential risk, national security risk, is less that the country would be invaded, but more that any country that sought to do us harm might seek to coerce through disrupting our sea lines of communication.

And whilst nothing is focused on Australia at the moment, we are seeing a critical sea line of communication being disrupted, with all the consequence, not just in terms of fuel but in terms of plastics, fertilisers. It has the potential to significantly impact our economy, and where that has led us to the point that Thys was making.

We now are seeing people talk in a really different way about the importance of manufacturing in respect of sovereign capability, of national resilience. And it makes me feel like, for the first time in decades, we are in a situation where the headwinds perhaps are changing, and they might be tailwinds in terms of the development of future manufacturing in this country.

Which then brings us to how we’re placed here in Geelong.

I actually think, you know, we have a really exciting future ahead of us in terms of manufacturing, and for a couple of reasons. I mean, firstly, it’s our geography, and particularly to the north of Geelong.

Geelong generally is kind of on the corner of Australia, with Sydney and Brisbane to our north, and Perth to our west. But we have a convergence in the northern part of Geelong of highway number one, the National Rail Gage, an airport, a seaport and land. It is the most strategic transport and logistics land, but the most strategic land in which to manufacture, to make things and distribute them around the continent, probably anywhere in Australia.

And I’m speaking to lots of companies that are talking about why that is makes Geelong such a favourable place to engage in business.

And you know, we are seeing Avalon itself, that precinct, and I think we’re really fortunate to have had Linfox be the owners and operators of that airport over a long period of time, because they’ve stayed the distance and seen this vision.

But we are watching it expand dramatically. There’s 2000 people now who are working each and every day in the Avalon precinct, and Hanwa is a great example of the kind of opportunity that area represents.

But it isn’t just Avalon. On the other side of the road in the Hills Road precinct between Lara and Corio, there is great opportunity there, and we need to see that opportunity taken.

But the other real advantage is, in a sense, our history, because we are a manufacturing town. We have contemporary manufacturing expertise, both in terms of research and institutions.

Deakin – I think Tim and Libby are going later today – the Fibre Cluster. I mean that centre actually has its history in wool, as the CSIRO developed its fibre technology centre that was here at Belmont, which then got merged into Deakin University.

But our manufacturing history there means that right now we have a contemporary expertise which is really valuable, but also our people. There are people working at Hanwa making military vehicles today who have spent a significant part of their careers at Ford.

And so the experience that we have is really important and attractive for companies that are seeking to do major manufacturing in Australia.

But I want to finish in saying that I feel like there are three thoughts, I guess, I want to leave you with going forward in terms of what I think we need to do to make sure that we are absolutely capturing this opportunity.

It is really important that we are seeing the land to the north of Geelong – I was going to say particularly to the west of the freeway, but actually it’s both sides of the freeway, but not just Avalon – both in a planning sense and an ownership sense, being focused on development.

Like that is absolutely critical, and it really means that we need to be advocating to both the council but also the state that land use there has the opportunity to create jobs now, and it’s important that opportunity is taken now, because we do have tailwinds which provide us with the opportunity for companies to come down here.

There is a whole lot of kind of red tape and history – and if you get me going, I’ll speak at length about this – that we need to cut through there, and there fundamentally needs to be a pro development attitude in respect of, principally the local government, but also state in respect of that land around there

I think secondly, the Manufacturing Council has a really important role to play, and I should acknowledge the role that, in a sense, it has played during periods where there has been headwinds, that you have kept people connected, that you have promoted manufacturing in this town.

It has also meant that it’s not just the people and the experience, but there is a kind of a tier of companies like Austeng, Thonton and IXL. I could go into others. It’s probably a mistake to start naming companies, but we have a whole layer of expertise in engineering and manufacturing, which it’s really important is a part of the supply chain of the big primes that come here when they do so.

Be it that we’re talking about Hanwa, we hope Lockheed, but those sort of companies coming here, they need to be using those companies which exist in Geelong now. And I really think that this organisation has a really profoundly important role to play in that.

And the final point I was going to make is in highlighting the strategic significance of that land to the north of Geelong by referencing it to transport and logistics. It emphasises the connection between transport and manufacturing.

Our oldest industry in this town is actually the port. That’s why we are here. It is imagined by state governments that the long term port function for Melbourne, which is now Australia’s largest city, will move to Bay West.

This is a massive opportunity for Geelong, and it’s a massive opportunity for Geelong manufacturing, and we, as a kind of as a civic leadership of this town, need to be focused on really laser like advocating on for that to happen as soon as possible.

You know, it has as a transformative potential for us as any development that we have seen in terms of our economic history, and we really need to start exercising our voice as loudly as possible for something we are pushing against an open door.

This is state government policy, but the sooner this happens, the better – better for Melbourne, frankly. But the sooner that it happens, the better. And it needs to be happening in close to Geelong, and so that we can therefore take advantage of everything that comes from that, and manufacturing will be a key part of it.

Manufacturing is a part of our DNA. It has been a huge part of Geelong’s history, and I really feel that we are at a moment in terms of the Zeitgeist and where the country is thinking, that we can look with confidence to manufacturing being a massive part of our future. Thank you.

 

ENDS