I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land we’re meeting on tonight, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation, and I pay respect to Elders past and present.
And I thank everyone at the John Curtin Research Centre for the invitation to deliver the 2026 Gala Dinner address.
Fervent in belief
There were some remarkable Australians around the Cabinet table in John Curtin’s day, not least of all Curtin himself.
Persecuted during the Great War for his pacifism and struggle against conscription, he went on to demonstrate decisive, pragmatic patriotism in the face of Australia’s greatest strategic peril.
But the member of that Cabinet I have focussed on recently is John Dedman.
To that farmer and Gallipoli veteran fell the task of leading the war organisation of industry, the Production Executive committee of Cabinet, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – forerunner to today’s CSIRO – and more.
Historian Stuart Macintyre described Dedman as ‘dour in manner’, ‘fervent in belief’, and ‘energetic’ in his effort to ‘grasp the nettle of the war economy’ in Australia’s national interest.
That meant not only rationing resources and labour but providing national leadership in pursuit of industrial and strategic objectives.
Embracing the talents of Australian women, as well as the working-aged men who remained.
Shaping Australia’s scientific and industrial research agenda to help prosecute war and plan for peace.
Dedman’s mission for a stronger, safer, smarter and fairer Australia should resonate today.
Of course, subsequent Labor governments made sure Australia's industrial and scientific infrastructure kept pace with a changing world.
In 1990, Bob Hawke – who saw Curtin as his model for national leadership – said the ‘lucky country’ needed to ‘become the clever country’.
The Hawke Government revamped Australia’s research and development system.
That included the first Cooperative Research Centres and R&D Corporations to solve shared economic and social challenges.
The Hawke story was not just about liberalising and opening up the economy – he saw elevating national research and development as a necessary corollary of reform.
Hawke knew then, as we know today, that national success required clear priorities and focus, a ‘balance between pure and applied research’, and the translation of R&D into industrial technologies and applications.
These reforms made their mark.
They contributed to improved productivity performance and national manufacturing investments like Cochlear and ResMed in the 1990s.
And the making of a more capable and resilient Australia.
Wrong turn
In hindsight, we can see how economic and strategic complacency took root in Canberra in the early part of this century.
The isolation that historically shaped Australia’s economy and national identity was no more.
Open markets and liberal democracy were in the global ascendancy. And Australia joined the world.
For two decades, Australia was buoyed by its export complementarity with Asia, while enjoying the shelter of the American strategic umbrella.
At the pinnacle of the trade boom, the sort of leadership Curtin and Dedman had once shown – crisis-hewn, focussed on building Australian capability and economic resilience – was relegated to a distant history.
Australia lost touch with its economic and strategic vulnerabilities – for “efficiency”.
In my three decades in the manufacturing sector, efficiency was a central concern.
But it is a poor substitute for strategy.
For industrial policy.
For the national interest.
In industrial areas and outer suburbs, factories closed and jobs disappeared.
Capability, lost. Critical facilities, lost. Skilled trades and apprenticeships, lost.
But given that the 2000s commodities boom was time-limited, and the rolling crises that tend to expose national vulnerabilities would inevitably return – the “efficiency” orthodoxy sold Australia short.
A generation of Liberals and Nationals weren’t troubled by the lack of a long-term plan, or about selling Australia short.
Our opponents have never understood that strong industrial suburbs and regions, with good jobs and a sense of shared purpose, are the bedrock of an economy, and of any enduring democracy.
They’ve never understood that democratic, social and industrial resilience are mutually reinforcing propositions.
I made that case to successive governments, while free-market fundamentalists and cost-cutting consultants – like Angus Taylor – were in city boardrooms spoon-feeding corporate Australia a diet of PowerPoints that said critical facilities and productive factories should be closed and good jobs forfeited in a race to the bottom against low-cost, often subsidised economies.
Our aluminium sector is a case in point.
Australia is one of the few countries with an end-to-end aluminium supply chain.
When aluminium smelters were faced with rising power costs at home and market concentration, overcapacity and subsidies abroad, workers, their union and managers banded together.
To lower costs, lift productivity and competitiveness, and secure long-term electricity certainty.
But lazy consultants like Mr Taylor did the easy thing, urging the owners of aluminium-producing assets to give up.
His advice – which I assume he was paid for – was to close those facilities, sack those workers and send economic opportunity to China.
Even as unions, businesses and communities fought to save the sector.
I was there. I know which side of the fence I was on.
Imagine if that sort of thinking had prevailed in the 1930s.
If Australians decided that industry and its skilled labour – its capacity embedded in industrial firms – weren’t essential for national resilience.
Curtin and Dedman saw that these industries were a strategic necessity – in the near term and the long run.
Civilian manufacturing plants were soon producing utility trucks, aircraft hardware and defence materiel, not only winning the war but building the post-war economy.
That post-war reconstruction shaped modern Australia.
Australians built a future that reflected their values, working side by side in manufacturing facilities.
They built communities around that work. They raised families in flourishing suburbs and regions.
They built the connective tissue of communities and a country.
Sporting clubs. Church groups. Public libraries. Country Women’s Associations.
Communities from Elizabeth to Newcastle to Mount Isa built civic solidarity and social institutions that buttress them still, despite the impact of change and decline.
Millions of working women and men joined trade unions. Every daily act of deliberation and struggle at work helped lift Australian living standards and gave our democracy its purposeful yet unpretentious character.
Deindustrialisation at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one cost good jobs in Australia’s industrial regions and suburbs.
It cost some of the vitality and social cohesion that industry built in the post-war years.
It also cost Australia in strategic terms, in research and development, in management capability and ultimately in terms of our economic resilience.
Successive Coalition governments failed to imagine that market concentration, overcapacity and unfair subsidies overseas, great power competition and trade volatility could threaten Australia’s economic and social security.
They thought Australian wages were too high, institutions were obstacles rather than sources of strength, and industrial workers could not be trusted to ‘build a canoe’, as Liberal defence minister David Johnston shamefully put it.
They offshored jobs and industries in a race to the bottom.
The perpetrators of that national vandalism now pretend they’ve been champions of ‘sovereign capability’ all along.
It is like returning home to find in your loungeroom a burglar who claims to be the cleaner.
Division politics is easy enough. Slogans and division and imported ideas of the sort that the current opposition leader offers, have never built a factory or an industry.
In fact, partisan, self-indulgent, unpatriotic sloganeering undermines the Australian reindustrialisation effort.
One Nation, for their part, pretend to be the friend of working families, but at every turn, they vote the same way – every time – as the Liberals and Nationals. For lower wages, worse jobs and weaker communities.
One Nation enjoy their private planes around the country and out to Florida, because they know where their bread’s buttered. And they are not about to bite the billionaire hands that feed them.
The actual work of reindustrialising Australia is hard.
It requires a Dedman-like discipline and determination to marshal national resources, collaborate with international partners and the private sector, and concentrate Australia’s scientific and R&D capabilities – which are excellent – on our national industrial and strategic objectives.
That is the Australian way.
Australia’s way in a less predictable world
Industrial policy is security policy.
Security is about deterrence – but it’s also about the economic resilience and productive capacity Australia needs to withstand global shocks.
Future Made in Australia is the Albanese Government’s industrial policy – the largest pro-manufacturing policy in Australia’s history – because the times demand nothing less.
Since my appointment last May, I’ve been making sure Australia retains its capacity to produce important metals like steel, copper, lead, aluminium and zinc.
Without the Albanese Government’s purposeful investment in Australia’s industrial regions – in partnership with state governments – there would be no copper production in North West Queensland, no fertiliser production at Phosphate Hill or elsewhere in Australia, no sovereign steelmaking at Whyalla.
And no pathway at Port Pirie and Hobart for processing critical minerals like antimony and germanium – important inputs for defence technologies and hardware.
I want to lift Australian capabilities in critical minerals processing and renewable energy manufacturing.
Because it builds economic resilience, security and creates jobs.
An Australian way that harnesses Australia’s natural advantages to drive a modern, durable electricity system.
Using solar, wind, storage and gas to give Australia the energy security it needs right now, as upheaval in the Middle East sends economic shockwaves across the world.
The Iranian regime might blockade the Strait of Hormuz, but it cannot stop Australian wind from driving Australian turbines to power Australian blue-collar industry.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia might invade Ukraine and cut off gas supplies to Europe, but it cannot stop the sun shining on Australian solar panels providing low-cost electricity to blue-collar workers in local firms.
No maritime blockade could stop Australian workers using Australian critical minerals and resources to make the strategic materials and metals that support our partners’ industrial processes and our own advanced manufacturing and defence industries.
The CSIRO is doing the important but difficult work of marshalling its resources behind these and other national priority areas.
Further economic security for Australians and Australian industry will come from a domestic gas reservation scheme that ensures Australian gas for Australia’s industrial needs.
And it was this Government that implemented Minimum Stockholding Obligations for oil refineries and fuel importers, so that Australia could be more fuel secure than at any time this generation.
The Albanese Labor Government is shaping a better future for every Australian.
A future with good jobs, strategic resilience and toughness in a less predictable world.
A stronger, more robust and uniquely Australian democratic society.
None of this is an argument for isolationism or old-fashioned protectionism.
Industrial policy is a necessity, not an obstacle, for Australia's purposeful engagement abroad and an economic tool to lift productivity and constraints on growth here.
The US–Australia Critical Minerals Framework; closer engagement with the European Union, India and Canada on matters such as AI opportunity and safety; and the forward-looking Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040 are all entirely consistent with a Future Made in Australia and a domestic focus on economic resilience.
Making Australia more productive, resilient and capable of securing its own industrial and technological future and supporting the resilience of our international partners.
That is a Future Made in Australia worth fighting for – driven by progressive patriotism, lifting national resilience and strengthening social democratic cohesion.
A new horizon
Australia is full of industrial promise.
Last year, Australia had five universities in the world’s top 100.
A scientist from the University of Melbourne, Professor Richard Robson, also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Researchers in other publicly funded agencies like CSIRO and ANSTO improving critical minerals processing, decarbonising high-heat industrial technology, abating carbon pollution, lifting farm productivity, mitigating natural disasters and exploring modular housing construction methods.
These are the challenges of our times, some worlds apart from those faced by Dedman and Curtin. But the rationale is the same—To equip Australia to make its own economic and social future.
That requires a strong, fit-for-purpose system of research, development and innovation, connected to Australia’s industrial and strategic objectives.
In November 2024, my predecessor Ed Husic commissioned a Strategic Examination of Research and Development – a generational examination of Australia’s public, private and institutional R&D effort.
I was delighted yesterday to be with Robyn Denholm, Tesla chair and leader of the review panel, for the release of their report, Ambitious Australia.
I thank each of its authors – former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb, renowned surgeon Fiona Wood, and tech and innovation specialist Kate Cornick, as well as Robyn – for their work.
Ambitious Australia highlights that Commonwealth expenditure on R&D – some $15.1 billion this financial year – is more fragmented and less impactful than it could be.
The panel identified over 160 programs across 13 government portfolios. In their words, ‘too many programs’.
Eighty-three per cent of those surveyed by the panel said there needed to be better coordination and clearer priorities across the system.
Prioritisation requires choices.
The CSIRO, which celebrates its centenary this year, has embarked on that hard but necessary effort.
Its recent research portfolio review was the first of its kind in fifteen years. It involves hard choices and change in the national interest.
Commonwealth base funding for the CSIRO is roughly a billion dollars each year, and this Government has provided substantial additional commitments to ensure that work continues: $45 million in the previous budget, and $233 million in MYEFO.
Of course, private sector effort matters just as much for real R&D impact.
The new Critical Metals for Critical Industries CRC – underwritten by $238 million of investment including $53 million from the Albanese Government – brings together more than sixty research and industry partners to work in the national interest.
The CRC will develop new processing and refining techniques that will underpin thousands of good blue-collar jobs and dozens of factories in industrial suburbs and resources regions around Australia.
Australia needs more of that purposeful R&D investment from the private sector.
The Ambitious Australia report points out that too many innovators take their discoveries offshore for scale-up and commercialisation, depriving Australian firms and workers of the opportunity.
It also says the current R&D tax regime is cumbersome, risk averse, funds subscale activities, and creates large benefits for R&D tax consultants.
According to the panel, there is not enough venture capital, nor are Australia’s vast reserves of national savings or institutional investors supporting Australian innovation as strongly as they should.
Australia’s R&D future
Ambitious Australia is optimistic, confident in its vision of a more effective, fit-for-purpose R&D system that solves big national challenges and creates good jobs for Australians.
It reaffirms for me that Australia’s key priorities – in health, agriculture, defence, energy, resources and technology – require greater coordination and alignment of scientific and industrial effort.
I welcome the Denholm report. The Government is considering its response, which will be serious, methodical and decadal in nature.
I will work directly with industry, the research sector and civil society to develop a program of action and to identify early reform opportunities, as the Government finalises its response.
But my objective is clear: a stronger, more effective system of scientific and industrial research and development that delivers for Australia and Australians, and which delivers a Future Made in Australia.
Rejuvenating Australia’s manufacturing and industrial base.
Securing good blue-collar and engineering jobs in the regions and outer suburbs.
Strengthening communities.
Vital in strategic terms, but also lifting national competitiveness, raising the speed limit on economic growth, securing our resources sector and strengthening Australian democracy.
Driving technological improvements that improve health, education and the care for all Australians.
My job is to drive reindustrialisation, strategic alignment and a more constructive sense of economic nationalism across Australia's industrial and scientific base in the national interest.
That's how Australians have met national challenges before.
Not with jingoism and fake nationalism, but with the same Australian pride, effort and unity of purpose that Dedman and Curtin provided Australia when it was needed most.
I’m delighted to be getting stuck into that work.
