If you’ve tried to buy a new designer sofa recently – or virtually any piece of European-made furniture – you’ll be familiar with the pesky expression, “about 26 weeks”. It’s the industry’s gentle way of telling you it will take half a year to arrive. Oh, and you’ll possibly need to pay for it in full now.

Good things have always required waiting, but the pandemic pushed out delivery times for imported high-end furniture to double the usual maximum of 12 weeks – and it hasn’t improved. You pay more and wait longer. Which has been handy for the otherwise blighted state of Australian manufacturing.