Page 55 - Food&Drink Business magazine September 2022

3 ■ SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2022 MACHINERY MATTERS
Far left: A good crowd at the Brisbane W.
Left: High powered speakers (l-r): James Wilson, Fibre King; Bill Walker, Queensland Govt; Prof Dr Cori Stewart, ARM Hub; Jacqueline Wilson, Sustainable Innovation; Prof Will Browne, QUT; and Emeritus Prof Roy Green, UTS
Below: (l-r) Melissa Nugent, ARM Hub; with Robert Becher, Inox; and Samuel Jesudian, ARM Hub
crossroads
Green from UTS. He began by highlighting how far Australia’s manufacturing output has fallen, and how far behind similar countries it has fallen, and
why it will fall further if nothing changes – and why all that is bad news for all of us.
According to Prof Green, Australia has dropped to 19th position in the league table of competitiveness, from a top
10 position, and for economic complexity – which he says
is a solid measure of future sustainability – Australia has dropped from a position in the 40s to 87th in the world. He
said that in the 1960s and ‘70s, manufacturing accounted for 25-30 per cent of Australia’s GDP. Today, it is just six per cent, which he said is the lowest level of manufacturing self- sufficiency in the OECD.
And the Professor pulled no punches with the future outlook, saying that investment in R&D
in Australian was low and getting lower, falling to 1.79 per cent of GDP, from the previous low figure of 2.2 per cent. He pointed out that countries with an evidently brighter outlook,
such as Germany, Korea and Israel, are investing triple what Australia spends on R&D as a percentage of GDP.
The commodities boom has shielded Australia from the consequences of its lack of investment in the future, but as Prof Green pointed out, we don’t add value to the dirt, and it won’t last forever. He said, “The commodity boom, which increased the value of our dollar, gave us a windfall revenue, so that our living standards increased by about 15 per cent in six years for no effort on our part, but behind this big consumption boom lay a structural deterioration of our economy, and that’s the deterioration that we’re living with now.”
Prof Green told the audience that until we really build up our commitment to knowledge- based industries and services, with advanced manufacturing at the centre, we will be doomed to being an ‘also-ran’.
However, before moving to the panel, he did offer a way forward, saying, “We have
to invest in knowledge and
ingenuity. We have a talented country. We have a talented workforce. We don’t have enough engineers, and we’ve still got to produce more skills here. We’ll need to also address the issue of skilled migration. But we’re noticing in the recent report that, for example, Internet of Things (IoT) adoption, would increase our GDP by $200bn over the next 10 years,
consumers through packaging. She said an example was the move away from single use to reusable packaging. She said, “We’re seeing a lot of work on reusable packaging, instead
of lightweighting, to actually making it more durable and using materials that can be used hundreds of times, and overlaying that with smart technologies.”
“It is increasingly hard to find the trade skills; the electricians, the fitters and turners, the people that actually make this stuff work.”
if we invested in it. But 67 per cent of our management are unprepared for IoT or digital adoption generally. So, there’s a huge amount of enterprise capability to go on.”
First speaker on the panel was Jacqueline Wilson, CEO of Sustainable Innovation Company, who spoke on the shift towards looking at sustainability in packaging, and on connecting with
Wilson said that with smart technology like QR codes, “you can really use the packaging to be responsible in place of the products that we that we are selling”. She also said Australia was hampered by the vast distances between towns and cities, which mitigated against companies clustering together to find a common solution. Next up was Professor Will Browne, Robotics Lead at
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