Page 137 - Australian Defence Magazine Dec21-Jan22

DECEMBER 2021-JANUARY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
FROM THE SOURCE MELISSA PRICE 137
PRICE: This isn’t just a concern for my portfolio, I would say it’s a concern right across the country across a range of industries and this goes to skills shortages as we’ve talked about earlier. We are facing a critical skills shortage that we must remain so focused on addressing. In my home state of WA, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that WA needs 55,000 more workers and that the skills short- age caused by interstate and international border closures will cost local employers $1.5 billion over the next year, and that’s just looking short-term. We know the challenges for our defence industry will be there for years to come.
As I’ve already spoken about, we have numerous pro- grams in place to address this but that doesn’t mean we can or will just simply sit back and hope that it all works out. We must be able to build the defence capability we need to defend our nation but that hinges on us developing a skilled workforce that can do it.
ADM: And in your view, what are the most significant un- tapped opportunities for Australian defence industry? PRICE: There’s no doubt there is opportunity for Australian defence industry here and overseas right across the capabil- ity spectrum. It clearly is identifying and building on the strength of the things that we are already doing, what we’re already good at. For example, Australian industry has de-
veloped world leading technology in areas such as cyber and space and autonomous systems. Having recently taken on the Science and Technology portfolio, space in particular is a domain that is of significant interest to me. Effective- ly I wear two space hats – Defence Space and Australian Space Agency hats – and you might
have seen that I recently announced Australia’s first mission to the moon, an Australian built rover will become the first piece of Australian technol- ogy to land on the Moon. My working title for rover is Red Dog and it will be built by a consortium of Australian businesses and researchers because clearly, we have incredible smarts and expertise in order to build that rover.
“OUR GOVERNMENT’S INVESTMENT IN SHIPBUILDING ALONE MEANS WE’RE GOING TO NEED THOUSANDS OF WORKERS OVER THE COMING YEARS”
The key is to leverage areas like
space, cyber and autonomous sys-
tems while focusing on the priority areas that are already identified through the Sovereign Industrial Capability pri- orities. In terms of those SICPs you may have seen that we’ve recently added four new ones: robotics, autonomous
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