Manufacturing is a cornerstone of Australia’s, Victoria’s and Geelong’s economy, driving innovation, creating high value jobs, and underpinning supply chain resilience essential for national prosperity and global competitiveness.
To help build a stronger and more prosperous manufacturing sector, GMC advocates across five key pillars that address the challenges and opportunities facing manufacturers in Australia.
1. WELCOME business
Encourage investment, remove obstacles, cut red tape, lift the burden of compliance, create industrial and employment zones that free up industrial land and smooth compliance.
Be proud of manufacturing. Be proud of Defence Industry. Avoid adding unwarranted industrial relations complexity.
2. EMBRACE all energy options
Embrace all energy options available to ensure security of cheap and reliable energy supply.
3. PROTECT industrial land and infrastructure
Protect and create industrial habitats in regions; secure industrial zones that can support manufacturing, their supply chains and clean economy initiatives such as recycling and circular businesses. Build and maintain transport infrastructure, including improvements to regional roads.
4. BUILD the manufacturing workforce
- Training & skills: Enable TAFEs and universities to continuously align the development and delivery of accredited training with evolving manufacturing skills profiles, ensuring industry-ready outcomes now and into the future. Support Victorian secondary schools to engage with defence industry, and TAFEs to develop defence internships programs.
- Skilled Migration: Regional occupation lists should be informed by a forward-looking evidence base that distinguishes between short-term, seasonal, and longer-term or persistent skills shortages. Genuine consultation with local manufacturers, industry associations, and leaders, is vital to identify priority occupations.
- Attraction & Retention: Government infrastructure investment decisions should account for their flow-on effects on manufacturing’s ability to attract and retain skilled workers, not just the jobs that the projects create directly.
5. SUPPORT early-stage advanced manufacturing
Australia must commit to a coordinated, national effort to support early-stage advanced manufacturing. This includes lifting R&D investment to globally competitive levels, strengthening alignment between research and industry, and providing targeted support for early-stage commercialisation and scale-up.
Australian governments, both state and national, must invest in deepening the collaboration between universities and manufacturers and actively integrate local firms into global value chains. In addition to a coordinated policy direction, as a nation, Australia must promote itself more assertively as a destination for innovation, investment, and advanced production.