Australia has eight companies in the top 500 companies listed by Forbes. Four are banks, two are retailers and the other two are Telstra and BHP Billiton. There are 158 manufacturers, the stand out wealth generators in any economy, on the list. South Korea and Switzerland have five each, Canada and Sweden have four each, Australia doesn’t have any. This is the challenge. We don’t have any large manufacturers operating globally. A country like Taiwan, in area about the size of Tasmania and with a similar population to Australia, exports $247 billion of industrial products every year.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, our total industry exports are at $249 billion, but mining accounts for more than 37% and manufacturing just over 32% and it’s declining. We have lots of initiatives but no single large company or industry is emerging. We have a number of SMEs, and good examples of stand alone SMEs such as ResMed and Cochclear, but we have no industry. This is the challenge. The areas I see developing are in medical devices, motor vehicles and aerospace.
One of our partners, the Victorian Centre for Advanced Material Manufacturing is working hard to create a carbon fibre industry in Australia and Swinburne’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is looking at titanium machining focused on the aerospace industry. But we have no clusters of companies that bring about industrial synergies you see in these other economies. One of the things we are driving towards through the activities of the centre is to encourage the creation of early clusters which hopefully will develop into industries later on.
