Imagine an industry so vital that it employs 1.32 million Australians – three times more than mining. This is the reality of Australia’s manufacturing ecosystem. It is a powerhouse generating over $100 billion for the local economy, and it needs us to look past the click-bait headlines to deeply understand, appreciate and care about this capability.
To survive, manufacturing must always advance, and our most capable manufacturers are out there proving that the game has completely changed.
Let’s look at Premcar and Walkinshaw – two shining lights that serve an industry that is regularly misunderstood and underestimated: automotive.
When car assembly shut down, pessimists said Australia’s automotive capability was gone. Premcar refused that view. It took its deep engineering and automotive skills, now seen on Nissan and Mitsubishi products, and applied them into the adjacent defence industry, building sovereign capability in land-based military vehicle powertrain engineering.
AMGC was there beside Premcar, co-investing with them into a project to install the latest-technology powertrain into an existing Defence vehicle, developing and manufacturing key components in Australia. By doing so, Premcar expanded its expertise to support the development and production of vehicles for the Australian Defence Force and export markets. The completed project is forecast to generate $5.25 million in revenue over five years and upskill and create 60 jobs.
In parallel, Walkinshaw Automotive Group evolved from traditional local car making into sophisticated engineering and vehicle-conversion businesses. When Walkinshaw was still Holden Special Vehicles (HSV), AMGC co-invested in a project to reinvent its digital backbone through a Product Lifecycle Management system using Siemens enterprise software.
Capability under pressure
For HSV, that digital thread opened global business opportunities and connected it directly to international supply chains. When COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted standard operations, the same system allowed engineering teams to collaborate with each other from home instead of the factory floor and keep making high-performance vehicles without missing a beat. That is capability under pressure. Today Walkinshaw boasts the largest remanufacturing facility in the country employing about a thousand highly skilled staff.
Premcar and Walkinshaw are thriving in their competitive niche, and they are not alone. Across Australia, smart companies are being creative and collaborating and scaling.
Evolve Group turned a modest co-investment into tens of millions in commercialised revenue by reshoring manufacturing from China of all places. ANCA employs more than a thousand people in Melbourne building custom robotics and CNC machinery used by Boeing and SpaceX. Sutton Tools shows that regional suppliers can scale into global value chains by being better, not cheaper. While minerals processor Alpha HPA turned an idea and the efforts of eight staff into an ASX unicorn in under five years and is set to employ 250 people in regional Queensland once its long-term expansion is complete.
Critics judge today’s manufacturing against the factory floors of the 1970s and 1980s. They look for smoke-stacked assembly lines and mourn their loss. But manufacturing is no longer defined by 1970s thinking – it is much broader. It is a vital national contributor that transcends the colour of a collar. Whether you wear a lab coat, overalls, jeans, or high-vis PPE, the ability to make things goes far beyond the old stereotypes of the imagination.
The potential is here
Ultimately, the ability to make things is the foundation of an economy’s resilience, not just for Australia, but for every relevant economy. We hear a lot about Australia being the “lucky country”, but we must turn that potential into sustained prosperity by backing our ability to make what the world wants and needs – both finished and unfinished, so-called intermediate goods.
The potential is here, latent and waiting. We must be better, not cheaper. In a high-wage nation, we cannot compete on cost, and we should not try. We need to use our brainpower to add value to the physical goods with which we are blessed. This does not mean making everything ourselves. It means becoming a reliable supply-chain partner: making core ingredients for the world’s batteries, components for complex devices and value-added food products, on top of exporting raw commodities.
The reverse opportunity is just as powerful. Australia should be asking not only what we can make from our own resources, but what we can import, improve and transform here. Finished goods made elsewhere can be redesigned, engineered, customised, converted or remanufactured by Australian firms for regional and global markets. Unfinished, intermediate goods, components and inputs can be upgraded into higher-value products before they leave our shores. This is where our manufacturers can win: by applying Australian know-how to any given stage of the value chain, focus on making more of what matters without pretending we need to make everything.
The data shows exactly how much room we have to grow; Australia has previously fallen as low as 105th on Harvard Growth Lab’s Economic Complexity Index and now sits at 74th, largely only because the data was recast, leaving us between Uruguay and Jordan with the second-lowest ranking of any OECD nation. This happens when a country relies too heavily on digging wealth from the ground and forgets how to add value. Why is this not a wake-up call to focus on our strengths? Are we too complacent?
To fully realise this future, we must also fill the “missing middle”: the space where small, smart manufacturers need the right support, funding and skills to become medium-sized global competitors. Australia’s future depends on nimble businesses that own their intellectual property and design complex solutions right here. The good news is that it is never too late. We must look forward, and like the manufacturers above, recognise how the game has changed, appreciate the massive workforce driving it today, and champion the advancement of Australian manufacturing that will be crucial to our continued prosperity in the future.
