MHD EVENTS
SEE AND SHAPE YOUR FUTURE ALC Forum 2020 will take place from 28 to 29 October, the event is set to connect business leaders, government representatives, investors, infrastructure owners and leading logistics companies. MHD finds out more.
T
he most challenging and expensive circumstances in businesses tend to arise when the things we take for granted stop working properly. If there were any doubts about the veracity of such an observation, the first half of 2020 has surely dispelled them. COVID-19 was not a term most Australians had heard as 2019 ended. Yet today, it is dominating political discourse, economic thinking and has forced changes to the way we all live our day-to-day lives. After what has been an extremely difficult few months for businesses, it’s critically important to consider what the experience has taught us, and what adjustments we should now make to policy and investment settings to make our supply chains more resilient in the face of such challenges.
46 | MHD JULY 2020
One byproduct of the COVID-19 crisis has been the spotlight on the operation of supply chains – and the negative consequences that can result if those operations are interrupted. Prior to March this year, there were several generations of Australians who had no direct experience of shortages, or the imposition of purchase limits on certain products. Suddenly, something that many thought had been consigned to history books became very real. Although the panic buying that gave rise to that situation has now abated, our biggest lesson from COVID-19 must surely be that we need to be prepared for the unexpected and ensure that our supply chains are resilient and agile enough to deal with similar disruptions in the future. ALC Forum 2020 will be the freight and logistics industry’s best opportunity to explore these issues,
and highlight the central role our sector will play in supporting the nation’s post-COVID recovery. Successfully and efficiently meeting the challenge begins with focussing on the future and ensuring that Australia is equipped with high quality freight transport infrastructure that embraces technology and facilitates the faster, safer and greener movement of freight through supply chains, whether it is destined for domestic consumers or for export markets. It is rare for a genuine ‘greenfields’ opportunity for a globally significant freight and logistics hub to emerge in a major Australian city. Rarer still to have it shaped in real terms by the immediate lessons learned from a global crisis. Yet, that is precisely what is now happening in Western Sydney – and the Australian Logistics Council is preparing to peel back the layers as
