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 – RED TAPE, ENERGY, INDUSTRIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, SKILLS and ADVANCED MANUFACTURING – that address the challenges and opportunities facing manufacturers in Australia.
What we need
- 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.
- Apprenticeships: Ensure apprenticeship training frameworks are fit for purpose and reduce complexity where possible. Often apprentices are required to study 90 competencies trained when only 10 are necessary. Fit-for-purpose apprenticeships could take 2 years rather than 4 years.
- 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 decisions must look beyond direct job creation to avoid destabilising the wider workforce. Because these major projects cannot exist in isolation, they actively draw skilled workers out of regular roles—effectively denuding existing companies of their talent. Investment pipelines must account for this industry-wide strain by mandating explicit skills replacement mechanisms, workforce growth targets, and mandatory training requirements within project approvals.
Why
- Training and education frameworks need to deliver relevant skills. Manufacturing offers rewarding and challenging jobs in regional Australia that make significant contributions to the local, state and national economies both directly and indirectly. Manufacturing is key to Australia’s sovereign capability development and an appropriately skilled workforce is a must.
- Net internal migration to regional Victoria has declined significantly since 2016-17, particularly among individuals aged 25-44. Migration should be viewed as a short-to-medium term strategy to ease workforce and skills shortages. It should be integrated effectively with broader initiatives aimed at improving workforce development and participation.
- Manufacturing and infrastructure compete for the same shrinking skilled trades pool: regional labour shortages are forecast to quadruple by 2027, while manufacturers already report critical apprentice retention issues and rising demand. Uncoordinated investment risks undermining both sovereign manufacturing capability and infrastructure delivery.
