Check against delivery
I begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people and extend my respect to First Nations Australians past and present.
Gerard, thank you for that introduction, and for the invitation to come and speak again at the Sydney Institute.
As I’ve travelled around the country in recent months, I’ve been introducing myself as the new industry minister.
But it occurs to me that I should drop the "new" qualifier.
During the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison years, the average tenure for an industry minister was not quite 13 months.
I’m not sharing this observation as a gratuitous partisan barb.
I’m sharing it in a spirit of genuine incredulity.
Industrial policy is the future shaper.
It’s the fulcrum between our industrial past and our technological, energy and industrial future.
It’s certainly not an after-thought.
Given the ubiquity and centrality of industrial policy around the world today, the relentless policy drift and personnel churn of our predecessors is hard to fathom.
It’s also impossible to excuse. Failing to rise to the challenges of the times is not a victimless crime.
Joseph Stiglitz got it right back in 2023 when he said that every country has an industry policy. The question is whether it’s explicit or implicit, coherent or incoherent.[1]
Australia is back in the coherence business.
The Albanese Government is bringing both ambition and strategic purpose to how we secure our place in the world, and how we shape the economy in the interests of all Australians.
Making progress on this great national project requires two things.
A clear understanding of the challenges we face.
And a sharp sense of how everything connects to everything else.
Australia cannot have strong local manufacturing without strong and effective trade remedies.
Australia cannot find its place in the rapidly evolving world of AI without a focussed innovation and R&D strategy.
Clarity that Australia’s path to reduce its emissions does not run through degrowth and deindustrialisation.
The opposite is true. Securing the changes to the energy system requires shoring up our critical sovereign capability in the short and medium term, and reindustrialising the country over the long run.
Critically, a country like Australia doesn’t grow stronger and more secure by waiting politely for the invisible hand.
As the Prime Minister has said, the game has changed, and the role of government must evolve.
We need sharper elbows when it comes to marking out our national interest, and we need to be willing to break with unhelpful orthodoxies and pull new levers to advance the national interest.
To combine market tools with government action to create wealth and opportunity.
Stiglitz also made the point in 2023 that delivering successful industrial policy goes beyond the material.
That means broader criteria for evaluating the success of our efforts. We need to understand and nurture what we value.
The first and most important task of a Labor government is to improve the material wellbeing of all Australians.
A strong economy that delivers opportunity for working people. Good jobs in the cities, regions and suburbs – created by thriving businesses and public enterprises.
But Labor has another guiding philosophy as well.
Stiglitz says success with shaping the future economy also requires caring about how well people live, what kind of lives they have, and what kind of society they have.
Ask not “who I am”
As the not-so-new industry minister, I welcome this opportunity to share my ambitions for Australian industry policy and explain the social democratic principles that guide me and my colleagues in that task.
I use the word ambition advisedly, because I sometimes read that we are a government that lacks ambition or doesn’t know what we stand for.
With the greatest of respect, the first of these propositions is silly.
And the existential proposition – what we stand for, what we are about – is the wrong question.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that Rae and I would read the kid’s story the Bunyip of Berkley’s Creek – the tale of a bunyip who emerges from the creek and sets off in search of his identity.
“What am I,” this creature wonders?
A platypus tells him that he is a bunyip. But what is a bunyip?
It is true that we spend less time around the Cabinet table parsing the imponderable and more time focussing on what the times require us to do.
It is one of those quirks of history: so often Labor governments come to power at a time when there is an urgent need to transform the economy and Australia to meet big national challenges.
Perhaps we can focus keenly on the business at hand because Anthony Albanese’s leadership has delivered a hard-won unity of purpose – and because our core values are immutable.
I understand the persistence of the bunyip’s question.
During the Hawke and Keating years the shelves of Australia’s public libraries were well-stocked with books about that government’s “hijack” or “betrayal” of the Labor tradition.
This was after that government reintroduced public health insurance, lifted the standard of social security, and saved the steel industry from imminent collapse, to name just a few of their achievements.
People also asked the “who am I” question during the Whitlam era a generation earlier, and the Scullin years a generation or two before that.
A party like ours will always have to reconcile its progressive ideals and social democratic aspirations with the practical possibilities of parliamentary democracy and the world as it is, not how some of us wish it to be.
The national interest, and the collective interest of Australians all, together, to make us stronger, more together and more resilient and capable of solving national problems.
But ours is a movement that gives clearest expression to our social and economic ambitions through action.
The question is not who are we, but rather, given everything, what do we do?
Industry policy redux
Proactive, social democratic industry policy is one of the most important things Labor governments do.
Twenty years ago, industry policy was completely out of fashion, not just in Australia but across much of the developed world.
For decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, industry policy had been dismissed as old-fashioned protectionism.
Labor under Hawke, Keating and John Button rightly championed the cause of economic modernisation, because the high tariff walls of the past were not going to make Australia more competitive or productive in the future.
In our rush to deliver trade liberalisation, comparative advantage and trade complementarity, governments sometimes forgot to safeguard sovereign capability.
Because the times felt benign, and the possibilities endless, that government’s successors forgot to prioritise economic resilience.
When the proceeds from the mining boom rolled in from 2002, Coalition governments didn’t use the opportunity to invest in Australia’s future industrial development.
In the 1950s, one in four Australian workers were employed in manufacturing.[2]
In 2019, that figure was nearer to one in 14 workers.[3]
I was elected as a Labor Senator that year after a quarter of a century in and around Australia’s manufacturing sector as an official for the AMWU.
Having seen the challenges of deindustrialisation on factory floors, I then saw how much the decline in manufacturing capability mattered when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, borders closed, goods stopped flowing and strategic weaknesses were exposed.
Australia was one of many countries to pause and reflect on the opportunity costs that we had incurred over two decades of deindustrialisation.
The rise of anti-competitive, unfair trading practices and industrial subsidies in the region around us after the pandemic gave those Australian reflections added urgency.
We have seen everything from tariffs and duties levelled on Australian agricultural exports to aggressive subsidies, export controls, and concentration of global market share in metal products such as nickel.
I think it’s fair to say the laissez faire complacency of the post-Cold War era has little to commend itself in this historical moment.
When I spoke to this Institute last year, I quoted the IMF – no great fan of industry policy – who had identified a rise in targeted government interventions to support industry, particularly in developed economies.
The Productivity Commission too has acknowledged that industry policy has “come back into fashion across much of the Western world”.[4]
This hasn’t happened by accident. It’s a rational, pragmatic response to the acute challenges of this moment.
Not just trade and competition. But also, the challenge of transitioning a carbon-intensive economy in a way that creates economic opportunity for people in our regions and outer suburbs.
Then there’s technological change that is transforming the working lives of billions of people at a pace faster than any other wave of innovation in human history.
That’s a formidable confluence of challenges.
Their scale and seriousness demand a response that puts ambitious, assertive industry policy at the centre of Australia’s economic agenda.
That’s what the Albanese Government’s Future Made in Australia plan is all about – focusing on our future competitive advantage in renewable energy, mining and processing and position in the region to maximise the new economy’s benefits for all Australians.
The $22.7 billion Future Made in Australia investment, along with the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund, amount to the largest pro-manufacturing package in Australia’s history.
The Fund’s investments, which have just hit $1 billion, are giving Australia the chance to develop and scale-up new technologies in fields such as critical minerals processing, AI-enhanced health care and plenty more.
Within the National Reconstruction Fund, the new $5 billion Net Zero Fund will invest in the industrial infrastructure and new clean energy technologies that will drive down emissions and energy costs for Australian heavy industry.
These initiatives and investments matter for Australia in a fast moving and less predictable world.
Industrial policy can maximise Australia’s current and future competitive advantages, lift onshore manufacturing and technological capacity and strengthen Australia’s economic security and resilience.
An Australia capable of producing and refining strategic metals and critical minerals onshore is a stronger, more resilient Australia.
Even the economic purists who criticise our industrial policy agenda in the pages of the Australian Financial Review concede that there “is such a thing as being strategically vulnerable”.[5]
That doesn’t mean we approach the task of industrial nation-building with an isolationism mindset – quite the opposite.
In October, Resources Minister Madeleine King and I travelled with the Prime Minister to Washington D.C., where Australia and the United States signed the Critical Minerals Agreement to support a pipeline of prospective projects worth at least $8.5 billion.
But it says so much about the changing global landscape that industry and resources policy are now at the very centre of Australia’s most strategically important bilateral relationship.
Nothing is changing the world faster than artificial intelligence.
Australia has to capture the economic opportunities of these transformative new technologies and share the benefits in an egalitarian way.
The National AI Plan that Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton and I released last week will attract purposeful investment in digital infrastructure and empower AI users to accelerate the pace of innovation across every Australian industry, and in every Australian workplace.
The Government knows, of course, that even as Australians adopt this new technology, many have reservations about its potential risks.
That’s why the new Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, to be established within my department with $29.9 million in funding, is at the heart of the National AI Plan.
The Institute’s job will be to lift the capability of government to monitor, test and keep up with this rapidly developing series of platforms and technologies, and to advise where rules and laws need to be updated.
This is what effective modern industry policy looks like – unlocking the full potential of the Australian people while keeping them safe from risks.
Over the summer, I’ll be reading the report of the Strategic Examination of Research and Development panel, chaired by Robyn Denholm.
I want to achieve greater alignment of effort and coherence of purpose across the R&D system, so that Australia can unlock new discoveries in areas of national strategic interest and develop those discoveries onshore, rather than outsourcing local ideas and buying them back from the rest of the world in commercial form.
The SERD exercise has been focussed on the core business of Australian industry: the business of making Australia’s economy more complex, its manufacturing sector more robust and its innovation ecosystem more attractive to the workers, researchers and investors of the world.
Industry policy and social democracy
Whichever unit of measure you use – kilometres travelled, dollars invested, blue collar jobs preserved, nation-building projects unlocked – 2025 has been a big year for Australian industrial policy.
That is what social democrats do. We act, pragmatically but with clear purpose.
Turning challenge into opportunity that leads to stronger communities, more resilient and purposeful democracy and a more resilient nation.
The mechanisms for making good on the social democratic promise of a good life in Australia have changed over time.
But those of us in the Albanese Government take seriously the state’s obligation to make decisions that preserve and strengthen economic conditions for working Australians.
That responsibility informed the thinking behind the decision of the Albanese and Malinauskas Governments to intervene at Whyalla Steelworks early this year.
It informed my interventions alongside South Australia and Tasmania to support a more efficient, higher value-adding future at Nyrstar’s lead and zinc processing facilities.
It informed my thinking as we negotiated a package with Queensland to support Glencore’s Mount Isa Copper Smelter and Townsville refinery.
And it informs the government’s approach to modernising and strengthening Australia’s anti-dumping and trade remedies system, so that it better meets the needs and urgency of this moment.
The alternative, in each case, is to abandon hundreds if not thousands of good blue-collar jobs in regional and suburban Australia.
To forfeit important industrial capabilities that serve Australia’s strategic interests.
To give up future hopes of leading Australia further up the value chain in a range of metal products that the world needs in IT, electronics, defence technologies and other high-quality manufacturing.
To give up the firms that make Australia an industrial nation.
In the long run, that would mean a weaker, poorer, less cohesive Australia that is more vulnerable in a strategically uncertain world.
New survey data from the ANU National Security College shows that three in four Australians worry about Australia’s vulnerability to external economic crisis, major disruptions to supply chains and deliberate disinformation campaigns waged on the public.[6]
Throwing away Australia’s established position in global steel, copper, lead and zinc markets would only exacerbate those economic and social vulnerabilities in Australia.
Social democratic principles don’t lead that way.
In fact, if you look across the world at some of the more politically polarised developed countries, you get a clear sense of what might happen here without proper investment in strong regional communities and work with purpose and dignity.
Widening inequality.
Antisocial behaviour.
Political extremism.
Democratic decay.
Nobody should be complacent about the prospect of these things in Australia.
I’m an optimist by nature, but I’m also a realist.
I’ve seen the strains of industrial decline on our social democracy – especially in rural and regional communities like the one in northern NSW that raised me.
It should not be beyond those of us who represent ordinary Australians to present a united front against extremist politics.
There is a tendency, I think, to assume that the far-right political parties on the march across the world can’t take root in Australia thanks to the quality of our democracy.
Of course, Australians have been world-leading innovators in democratic processes and principles.
Secret ballots and universal suffrage. Compulsory voting and preferential ballots.
Independent electoral commissions and, from July next year, real time disclosure for donations during federal elections.
We should be proud of these achievements.
We should also recognise that they cannot, on their own, inoculate Australia against the rise of extremist politics.
Conservatives know this. Former prime minister Tony Abbott implied as much the other day when he told an overseas gathering that mainstream conservatives “have no one but themselves to blame for the rise of far-right populists”.[7]
He’s right to make that point, but his proposed solution – that mainstream conservatives adopt a more extreme and foreign right-wing posture on everything from net zero to multiculturalism and the welfare state – is imported politics, ideas that undermine who we are as Australians.
Part of our social democratic approach is an industrial agenda that gives Australians confidence in the future of their local communities and their country – and a meaningful, personal stake in that future for them and their families.
Delivering on the promise of jobs and economic opportunity for working people in our suburbs and regions, not just in our CBDs.
Delivering the investment on which industrial vitality and employment really depends.
Meeting Australians where they are, understanding their needs and aspirations, their concerns and anxieties.
Governing from the centre.
Not some artificial centre of the political spectrum defined by extremes that the Greens and One Nation help set at either side.
But governing from the centre of gravity in the Australian community – where ordinary Australians live.
Building an economic future builds faith and trust in the democratic project and in each other, and confidence in Australia as a binding national idea – the opposite of the political right’s modern obsession with identity as a focus of division.
Progressive patriotism, to coin a phrase.
Conclusion
In the ANU National Security College survey I mentioned earlier, nearly two thirds of respondents said that ensuring “peaceful and safe” Australian communities was their first or second priority – ranking well above “security” in the narrower sense of that term.[8]
That’s where the centre of gravity is in Australian public opinion.
People want safe, peaceful communities that are secure from the threat of fear and want and division. They want a democracy that delivers for people.
This Labor Government views industry policy as the centripetal force that holds modern social democratic society together and creates the conditions for security in those broader terms.
That’s why our historic ambitions in the area of industry policy remain front and centre in our economic agenda today.
Labor exists – has always existed – for the purpose of giving everyday Australians the chance to realise their aspirations in a safe, peaceful environment.
Not just in good times, but in the hard times too.
World Wars. Recessions and depressions. Technological transitions. Economic reform.
Labor has provided political leadership, policy courage, moral clarity and always a wealth of ambition in response to these things.
If not always the natural party of government as some used to put it, Labor was always the natural party of Australian progress.
That’s as true of the future as it is of the past.
ENDS
[1] https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/news/way-forward-industrial-policy
[2] Graph 1, Elliss Connolly and Christine Lewis, ‘Structural Change in the Australian Economy’, Bulletin, RBA, p. 1, https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2010/sep/pdf/bu-0910-1.pdf
[3] Penny Vandenbroek, ‘Snapshot of employment by industry, 2019’, Flagpost, 10 April 2019, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/Research/FlagPost/2019/April/Employment-by-industry-2019
[4] Danielle Wood, “Industry policy in today’s Australia”, 12 September 2024, https://www.pc.gov.au/media-speeches/articles/industry-policy/
[5] Richard Holden, ‘Labor needs a strategy to say where minerals bailouts stop’, AFR, 13 October 2025, https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/labor-needs-a-strategy-to-say-where-minerals-bailouts-stop-20251012-p5n1sz
[6] https://nsc.anu.edu.au/news/amid-rising-security-concerns-australians-prioritise-safe-and-peaceful-communities
[7] https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/it-s-your-own-fault-you-are-losing-abbott-tells-world-s-conservatives-20251205-p5nl1q.html
[8] https://nsc.anu.edu.au/news/amid-rising-security-concerns-australians-prioritise-safe-and-peaceful-communities
