Forging a modern manufacturing sector with highly skilled jobs will have a “profound social and democratic effect”, the new Future Made in Australia assistant minister has declared.
In his first major speech since stepping into the newly created role last week, Senator Tim Ayres outlined the “vast nation building project” that he will now coordinate under the stewardship of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The senator has positioned the policy as one that goes beyond economic returns, by “honouring the social contract”, particularly with Australians in regional and regional communities.
“With new investment in manufacturing returns to their communities. Good jobs that young families can build a quality life around. That communities can count on,” he told the Sydney Institute.
As Assistant Minister for FMiA, Senator Ayres, who doubles as Assistant Minister for Trade, will play a key role in a $22.7 billion agenda that cuts across several portfolios, including Treasury and Climate Change and Energy.
It is a job he is more than qualified for, having spend the last two years as Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and his pre-political career working for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Senator Ayres said said his unique experience has given him a “bird’s eye view of not just the scope of the national challenges that we must address, but also of the community and national building potential of the FMiA Act”.
Growing up in the regional New South Wales, he witnessed the decline of manufacturing and the country’s transition to a services economy firsthand in the 1980s and 1990s.
“When I graduated, to spend the bulk of my working life in the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, economic opportunity was in flux,” he said on Monday night.
“I saw up-close the impact on workers, their families and their communities. Apprenticeships, good jobs, businesses, large and small, disappeared from industrial heartlands, our suburbs and country towns.”
Tectonic shifts also can also lead to alienation, anger and, ultimately, “resurgent populism” – a unifying feature of which is a “distrust of institutions, a repudiation of cosmopolitanism, of globalisation”.
And with new existential challenges emerging as a result of climate crisis and geopolitical competition, Australia is now at a similar crossroads, requiring a clear vision for the future from government, he said.
Prompted by fracturing industry policy, Senator Ayres said FMiA is the “biggest, most ambitious pro-manufacturing package by any Australian government” ever, and will result in “good new jobs”.
“It is neither old school protectionism, nor is it dogmatic neoliberalism,” he told the Sydney Institute.
“It is mission focussed on a series of critical national interest questions that will determine whether Australia is safe, economically secure and resilient in a more challenging world.”
New investment in manufacturing will also result in “good jobs with purpose – that contribute to a stronger and more resilient Australia”, and “quality … careers for boys and girls at school today”
“Engineers, trades and technical roles for young Australians who will be part of not just a resurgent manufacturing sector, but a vast nation building project…” he said.
“That shapes a future for those outer suburban, industrial and country communities where the economy works to build a good society, not the other way around.
“And that has such a profound social and democratic effect. Strengthening society and democracy, in a world where democracy has been in retreat, by honouring the social contract and delivering good jobs and industry with national purpose.”
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