Australia’s scary new record as regional cities pivot from manufacturing
It was once a poster child of Aussie industry. But the sights and smells of Burnie the industrial powerhouse are now a distant memory.
It was once a poster child of Aussie industry.
Smoke and steam belched from the Burnie paper mill, and the sea around the coastal city in north west Tasmania ran orange due to effluent from the Tioxide paint and pigment factory, inspiring the lyrics of a Midnight Oil song.
But the sights and smells of Burnie the industrial powerhouse are now a distant memory. From the 1990s the big factories shut down, leaving many residents in a spiral of welfare dependence and poverty.
It’s a familiar story across Australia: regional towns and cities forced to reinvent themselves after their biggest employers went under.
Pockets of optimism – and new jobs – have begun to appear in recent years, however, as sectors like renewable energy and tourism offer some cities a new lease on growth.
In Burnie, Andrew Turner owns Chapel Cafe and Communion Brewing Co, two relatively new businesses that employ a combined 45 people.
The 43-year-old Hobart native moved to Burnie in the early 2000s, lured by his wife’s agriculture studies and an $80,000 home.
When he arrived, the paint factory had already shut down and the paper mill was still running, albeit at reduced capacity.
“We were here when they made the call to pull the plug and then watched it be demolished,” the father of three told news.com.au as part of News Australia’s Back Australia campaign.
“It came on top of a lot of other things as well.”
In 2016, Caterpillar also moved its manufacturing of underground mining trucks from Elphinstone’s Burnie facility to Thailand.
“That was all within 10 or 20 years of each other so the town took a pretty massive hit,” Mr Turner said.
“A lot of our friends, their first job was the paper mill. They learned their trade there and their dad worked there, learned their trade there. So, you know, it was a generational employer in the town.”
The hospitality-trained Mr Turner saw opportunity, however – a lack of fine coffee.
“When I moved up here, there weren’t really any good coffee roasters, so I started roasting coffee – just myself in the shed with a bread maker and a heat gun,” he said.
Friends urged him to open a cafe and when the right space became available, an old chapel that had housed various shops in the past, Mr Turner jumped on it.
“We put a bit of an investment prospectus out to our friends and family, and said we needed around $50,000. Within a few days or a week we had the promised $50,000, and so I was like OK, I guess we’re doing this.”
With beans roasted on-site and speciality coffee, the Chapel quickly became an institution among locals and newcomers. It’s also known for one of the best brekkies in Tasmania.
“We often have people that move to Burnie and tell us that the Chapel kind of sealed the deal – they came there, they felt like that they belonged and it was part of their reason for staying.”
Once the cafe was ticking along, Mr Turner returned to the experiments in his shed, this time opting to brew beer. It was an operation that quickly expanded into a fully-fledged brewery, built in a former tyre warehouse.
Communion Brewing Co was built with the help of Covid-era loans and now employs 30 people.
Mr Turner said he was worried about rising costs in the hospitality industry, but there were exciting projects on the horizon that might bring more jobs and capital to Burnie.
The big one is Marinus Link – an undersea cable that will export Tasmania’s renewable energy to the mainland when demand is high. The $3.9 billion cable begins construction next year and will make landfall just east of Burnie, so the city is well-placed to benefit.
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Burnie Mayor Teeny Brumby said the project could create up to 3300 jobs across its various phases.
“If we deliver local content, training, and supply chain access, Burnie stands to capture a meaningful share of those roles,” Ms Brumby told news.com.au.
The city also plans to revitalise its CBD in a bid to make it more attractive to residents and visitors.
“We are entering a once in a century opportunity,” Ms Brumby said.
“Burnie has long been a manufacturing and industrial centre but over recent decades we’ve seen the challenges that come with reliance on a few large employers.
“The pivot now is diversification and resilience. These renewable energy projects, paired with strategic urban renewal, mean that our youth, families and workforce can find opportunities at home rather than leaving the region.”
Aussie producers holding their own
Australia now has the lowest manufacturing share of GDP in the OECD. That means it is nowhere near as self-sufficient as its peers, relying on imports for everything from electronics to clothing.
But the country used to make cars, televisions, fridges, and even passenger planes.
In the 1970s, manufacturing’s percentage of GDP was 15 per cent – this year it has reached a record low of 5.1 per cent, according to the latest Bureau of Statistics figures.
Tariff cuts, a stronger Australian dollar and rising energy costs have all made local manufacturing less competitive over time.
A small but telling example is the decline in soft drink bottlers.
Before the 1980s, almost every regional city had its own bottler making lemonade, ginger beer and cola.
Multinational brands – Schweppes and Coca-Cola – have since absorbed or out-competed many of these small bottlers.
Not all of them, however. One that is still holding its own against the big players is Saxbys in Taree, on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
“As a bottler we just try to be very resilient and keep banging away,” managing director Ian Turner, no relation to the earlier Mr Turner, told news.com.au.
“You believe in your products, and when you need to compete, you compete.
“Sometimes it can be hard on your bottom line, but over the years we’ve been very persistent and not afraid to take on the big guys,” he said.
Mr Turner is the great-great grandson of George Saxby, who founded the company at Chatham in 1864.
Since then, Saxbys has survived all sorts of hardships, even managing to scrimp enough steel for its bottle caps during World War Two.
But more disruption came in the 1970s when the old model of return bottles was replaced with one-way bottles and aluminium cans.
The regional bottling plants were replaced by big city bottlers, which could distribute drinks more cheaply and easily. And before long, even the city operations were mainly acting as distributors for international companies, rather than bottling their own products.
“We kept up returnable bottles until about 2004 – when he stopped it was because we couldn’t get any returnable bottles any more, no one was making them in Australia,” Mr Turner said.
There were more headwinds in 2008 when Asahi bought the Schweppes brands in Australia and chose not to renew its existing contract with Saxbys.
“At the time they (Schweppes) were probably a third of our business,” Mr Turner recalled.
“It hits hard, and we had to work out ways to replace it. It’s been a tough slog ever since then.”
Saxbys cannot match the marketing and product innovation budgets of the multinationals, but it has strengths that Coca-Cola and Schweppes can’t compete with, including local heritage and community loyalty.
Mr Turner said he had noticed a growing inclination among customers to buy Australia-made.
“With the current economic climate I think they like to do it, and I’m sure we feel it in many ways.”
He also pointed out that some drink brands hold themselves out as Australian but are actually owned by foreign companies like Coca-Cola.
“I like to think Australians would like to know where the profits go – whether it’s Australia or overseas.”
This article is part of the Back Australia series, which was supported by Australian Made Campaign, Harvey Norman, Westpac, Bunnings, Coles, TechnologyOne, REA Group, Cadbury, R.M.Williams, Qantas, Vodafone and BHP.
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Originally published as Australia’s scary new record as regional cities pivot from manufacturing
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