Rare chance to reboot manufacturing: Andrew Liveris

Former Dow Chemical chief Andrew Liveris says there’s plenty of potential in Australian manufacturing, but we hold ourselves back.

Andrew Liveris. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Former Dow Chemical chief Andrew Liveris says the coronavirus crisis has created a generational opportunity to reset Australia’s industrial policy, get away from “developing reports” on the subject and recreate the country’s manufacturing base.

Speaking at an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia webinar on Monday, Mr Liveris said he believed the work of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission, of which he is a commissioner, would create a workable national industrial policy capable of taking the country’s manufacturing sector forward for the next generation.

“What we have done is develop the sectors we should scale in. We’ve done that through inventorying all of the capability and as we look at those sectors and where we’re good and where we’re not good, we see massive inefficiency,” he said.

“The country has done a phenomenal job of developing reports, developing studies, developing what it should do — and failed to do it.”

‘The country has done a phenomenal job of developing reports, developing studies, developing what it should do — and failed to do it.’

The final report of Mr Liveris’ manufacturing task force has not yet been released, but a leaked copy of the draft identifies six key areas it says should become the focus of state and federal government policy: food and agricultural technology; healthcare and biotechnology; critical minerals, rare earths and minerals technology; energy and renewables technology; advanced building materials; and space and ­defence.

“The ecosystem that creates manufacturing needs to be reassessed. It shouldn’t be a 20th century toolbox. It shouldn’t be tariffs, it shouldn’t be protectionism. In the digital economy, in the sustainable economy … the answer is very simply in the quality of what we do, and the quality of the people who do it,” he said.

“And the country is full of quality, it just hasn’t organised ­itself very efficiently. We don’t scale very well because we live in 20th century paradigms. Even the term ‘tyranny of distance’ is still used in the lexicon around here. That’s so last century it’s not even state-able any more.”

Mr Liveris told the AmCham forum a major focus of the final report — believed to have been already given to Prime Minister Scott Morrison — would be creating the framework for a “public-private partnership” to take Australia’s manufacturing sector forward.