104
PUMPS & VALVES BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
Australian manufacturers: Apathetic, too busy or just simply Fed Up? Despite constant public commentary regarding its importance to Australia and its economy, the manufacturing industry remains in a prolonged decline that has continued for decades. Moreover, this doesn’t seem to be of significant concern to the public – or indeed to many manufacturers. Linsey Siede explores the possible reasons why. Like many of the readers of this magazine, I am a passionate manufacturing person who cares a little too much about things I can’t control, which subsequently results in me taking many things to heart that I really shouldn’t. This includes experiencing decisions about the manufacturing sector that I just don’t understand, which just seems to make me even more exasperated and upset than I would have been anyway. I don’t mean to sound philosophical but I believe that people are either passionate about something or they’re not; and if they’re not, then they have most likely just given up on whatever it was that they did at one point care greatly about. In my case this was the closing of the Australian automotive manufacturing industry. Then, after going through the Seven Stages of Grief – well, six of them – the seventh stage: “Acceptance & Hope”, was in my case really more thinking that there must be other things I could get interested in, and perhaps eventually even get passionate about. I was correct: there are; and I am again. I wrote an article for the December 2019 edition of AMT entitled ‘Is “Manufacturing Value-Added” undervalued?’. It highlighted the fact that, despite all the public hype and rhetoric around advanced manufacturing and Industry 4.0 and how this would change, improve and save the industry, manufacturing in Australia was actually continuing to decline. At that time manufacturing was hovering around only 6% of Australia’s annual GDP, and yet somehow this fact seemed to be entirely lost on Australia as a nation, and in fact on most Australians. Maybe people didn’t understand the serious implications of this fall with regard to generating wealth for our country – or worse still, perhaps they just didn’t care. It’s amazing to me to realise that the manufacturing sector contributed almost 30% of Australia’s GDP in the 1950s before beginning its long and continuous decline. According to the World Bank, by 1999 this contribution had fallen to 12% with seemingly little concern, but by 2016 this had halved again to a miserly 6%. This figure is the second-lowest of all 32 OECD countries, and almost two and a half times less than the OECD average of 14%. To me at least, this would appear to be extremely concerning, and yet it continues to decline. Again according to the World Bank,
AMT OCT/NOV 2021
a survey to try and identify ways to help the manufacturing industry, and then pass this information onto government. As one of only 253 people to complete the questionnaire, I was completely taken aback by the extremely low number of people who took the opportunity to provide feedback to AMTIL on questions regarding the help they needed and the government support programs that could support them. I wondered about the reasons why people would not take 15 minutes to identify things that could help their business. As Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to ask: “Why is it so?”
Australia’s contribution to GDP from the manufacturing sector in 2019 had fallen to only 5.6%. While other countries have realised the contribution from this sector is far too low and have already halted the decline, in Australia the number is still falling. This is confirmed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, whose data shows that by December 2020 the percentage of GDP represented by the manufacturing sector had now fallen to 5.5%. Although the rate of decline is slowing, the level is still very low compared to almost all other countries. Can this number be turned around? What does it take before we as a Nation decide to get involved and do something about it? Why don’t we do something? As a Country, do we actually understand what is happening? Do we care? Have we given up? Have we actually just lost the passion? Recently AMTIL undertook
AMTIL has a longstanding reputation that has been well earned from its excellent connections and relationships with government representatives and its nononsense manner of communicating with them. Based on that fact alone, I saw this as the perfect opportunity for people and companies to get their thoughts and messages directly back to government – whether it was positive or negative feedback they wanted known. This started me thinking (sometimes a dangerous thing) about why, from the 4,777 invitations sent out to people and companies, only 5.3% took the opportunity to complete this important survey.
Apathy? Based on 10 years as the Director of the Automotive Supplier Excellence Australia (ASEA) program – that coincidently ended on the same date as the last of the OEM automotive manufacturers left Australia – I know that there are many companies that
Registered business breakdown by number of employees.
