I want to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which UTS stands today. I extend that respect to Elders past and present, and to any First Nations people here.

I’ve been a regular visitor to Australia’s university campuses since my appointment to the science and innovation portfolios four months ago.

In fact, some weeks I spend more time on campus than I did in my final year as an undergraduate student at the University of Sydney.

I acknowledge the many hardworking public service agency leaders, directors of institutes, CEOs of important professional associations, deans and professors, researchers and postgraduate students here today.

Two of my parliamentary colleagues, Assistant Ministers Patrick Gorman and Emma McBride, are speaking today – wonderful to see you both.  

Peter Shergold, Chair of the Australian Research Council and formerly chair of the Australian Public Policy Institute – it’s great to have someone of your experience on hand for today’s discussions.

I was unaware of the appointment of Peter Varghese as the Chair. For a beach fisherman like me, that’s known as a good catch.

Peter, you’ve been a remarkable contributor to Australian public policy. I really look forward to seeing your contribution over the coming years as chair of this organisation.

Former premier of Western Australia Geoff Gallup – another Australian who continues to make a strong contribution after their formal political career has concluded.

Katsumi Shimmura and Britney Manns from the Consulate General of Japan here in Sydney, a warm welcome to you.

Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt of UTS – thank you for hosting this event.

Professor Roy Green, Special Innovation Adviser at UTS and someone whose thinking I value across the full gamut of my portfolio responsibilities.

And of course, I want to acknowledge Libby Hackett, Luke Henderson and the wonderful team at the Australian Public Policy Institute (APPI) for inviting me to speak to you.

Australian Public Policy Institute

There’s so much about this Institute that I have admired since its establishment under the leadership of my friend Dr Patricia Azarias.

In those early says of the James Martin Institute, the decision of the then-government of NSW to find a role for this institution really did set this organisation up to make that contribution.

There is enormous value in your online publications, research reports and podcasts.

But what impresses me most is the way this Institute is building a reliable pipeline of timely expertise that feeds directly into the policy process.

The Policy Challenge Grants are spectacular. They are mission-led, collaborative and directly geared to solving real-world problems that matter right now.

The findings from those projects are all the more impactful thanks to your partnerships with the university sector, the NSW Government and more recently the Australian Public Service Commission.  

To the extent that I studied public policy, there was this dry language used to describe policy activism – I think the phrase ‘policy entrepreneurship’ sticks in my head as a particularly banal, individualistic conception of how policymaking works.

I really do like how Peter described tripartism. Tripartism – or this radical concept, pluralism – means the role of institutions working together in a credible way in the national interest.

That really does underline the way that the Albanese government thinks about public policymaking.

It’s a partnership with our institutions and business community. The university sector and the research sector more broadly. Our trade unions. Civil society. All working with government to solve national problems.

Think of how influential Australia’s leading economists were in the 1950s and 1960s as Australia mobilised its industrial and human resources after the second world war.

And in the 1980s, when economic expertise helped drive the modernisation of Australian industry and the internationalisation of the wider economy.

Social scientists across many disciplines have co-created a positive, distinctly Australian approach to anti-discrimination and equal opportunity for women, migrants and the First Australians.

Health economists helped design Australia’s public health insurance system.

Australia’s epidemiologists and visionary public servants, political advisers and ministers spearheaded Australian responses to the HIV-AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s – and that set us up well for Australia’s COVID pandemic response.

Active collaboration between researchers and policymakers has done so much good for the health and living standards of Australians over the years.  

Australia’s climate journey

Of course, there is one policy area where Australia’s world-leading researchers have, at times, been disrespected and ignored for ideological and opportunistic reasons, and at great cost to Australia.

I’m speaking, of course, about climate and energy policy, and its implications for industry policy.

Fifty years ago, researchers began referring to ‘global warming’ in scientific journals to describe the effect of carbon emissions on earth’s atmosphere.  

And for 40 years at least, policymakers have been deliberating in national and international fora in search of substantial, practical responses.

Australia has everything at stake here.

A failure to lead on the global response would exacerbate all of the agricultural, industrial, public health, strategic and other risks set out in the National Climate Risk Assessment, released last week.

The Treasury modelling, and common sense, ably demonstrate the consequence of policy paralysis or inadequate, stop-start approaches to energy and industrial policy.

And more than any other place on earth, we have most to gain from a low-carbon global economy thanks to our vast solar and wind resources, mineral wealth, proximity to growing markets and strategic partnerships.

As a highly carbon-intensive and trade-oriented economy, Australia was always going to find decarbonisation to be a big challenge.

Early on, Australian governments respected the scientists who were diagnosing the problem as well as the economists and social scientists who were proposing practicable, pragmatic solutions in Australia’s national interest.  

The Keating Government put Australia’s signature to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – showing that Australia was serious about its role in reducing global carbon emissions.

The Howard Government – rarely progressive but usually pragmatic – legislated Australia’s first mandatory renewable energy target and developed plans for an emissions trading scheme.

The Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments moved heaven and earth to find a way through the political quagmire in which good climate and energy policy got stuck after 2009, when an unholy alliance of Coalition and Greens senators scuttled Labor’s emissions trading scheme.  

None of those governments got everything right.

But nobody doubted their policy seriousness, their commitment to answering big problems with practical solutions, and their respect for the expert advice of scientists, researchers, the academy and the public service. 

As a result, Australia has a range of tools at its disposal - renewable energy and emissions reduction targets, special investment vehicles for clean energy finance and industrial decarbonisation, and strong global partnerships – to draw on in the mission to avoid dangerous levels of warming.

The wasted decade

Of course, Australians know that the strategic leadership and evidence-based approach adopted by earlier governments was not sustained during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years.

The Coalition spent nine years in government engaged in an internal contest over climate and energy policy.

The result of those years and that paralysis was 22 discarded climate and energy policies and enormous investment uncertainty.

It seems obvious, but policy stability really matters for attracting the investment to drive big missions like industrial decarbonisation, research and development in energy efficiency and boosting the contribution of renewable energy resources to the Australian grid.

And for the regional Australian communities whose jobs are concentrated in heavy industries, policy stability matters too.

Instead, what we saw was policy chaos leading to corporate underinvestment in new and emerging technologies, including energy generation and infrastructure and new production processes, and in fact disinvestment in nation-building energy projects.

At the same time, Australia became a leading global exporter of LNG and, regrettably, an importer of the world’s volatile and high gas prices.

Taken together, unaffordable energy and domestic underinvestment, along with overcapacity in other markets and disruptions in global trade, have left Australia’s industrial sector in a precarious position.

Industry policy that works

In the face of growing economic and strategic competition, Australia must strengthen its existing industrial infrastructure, not abandon it.  

That’s why the Albanese Labor Government has undertaken major and transformational industry policy with the Future Made in Australia agenda, encouraging investment and creating opportunity for Australian firms, workers and regional communities, so that they can share in the benefits of the shift to a low carbon economy.

This is a modern industrial policy framework. It doesn’t start with the premise that traditionally informed industry policy, which was focused upon the economic and social benefit of investment in industrial capability. But it starts, as the Future Made in Australia Act does, with what the national objectives and imperatives are.

For the Future Made in Australia, the two national interest framework principles are, firstly, founded in economic resilience and a security and strategic rationale, and secondly, in establishing Australia’s future competitive and comparative advantages in our mineral resources and low cost future energy capability.

The economic and social outcomes, which will be felt mostly in our outer suburbs and our industrial regions – again, I think of the sterile language of the economists here – as spillover benefits.

That is modern industrial policy – focused on the national interest.  

Turning challenge into opportunity for revitalised industries, greater economic complexity, national resilience and good jobs

That’s what modern industrial policy can deliver when it really works.

Let me set out just one industrial and resource opportunity: the iron and steel sector.

Australia should use its vast iron ore resources and renewable energy to manufacture iron here and export value-added iron and steel products to our partners around the world, decarbonising iron and steel industrial processes for our steelmaking partners, and protecting our iron ore exporters from replacement as our customers invest in other mining regions.

The Albanese government is investing $1 billion through the Green Iron Investment Fund to support early movers to establish in Australia.

We’re backing battery manufacturing through the Battery Breakthrough Initiative.

And delivering a long-term capability in aluminium production using renewable energy through the Green Aluminium Production Credit.

In terms of the iron possibilities for Australia, the proposition that we might remove for our steelmaking partners the most emissions-intensive step in global steelmaking (which contributes about 8 per cent to global emissions) and onshore that capability here and protect the future of our iron ore sector – so reducing emissions, protecting the future of our iron ore sector, delivering good jobs, improving Australia’s economic complexity and having a big impact on productivity – that is a nation-building 
objective worth fighting for.

That’s what this industrial policy framework is directed towards.  

The Albanese Government routinely draws on Australia’s own scientific, economic and strategic expertise – at the CSIRO, at our university campuses, and in this sector, at the Heavy Industry Low-carbon Transition Cooperative Research Centre, and in the private sector – to make sure Australia can become a low-carbon powerhouse for the region and the world.

Change on this scale requires a clear vision for the future, courage, and a willingness take decisions in the present that make that future reachable.

This is not without its challenges. Australia’s old and unreliable coal-power stations and unaffordable gas is putting significant pressure on Australia’s industrial facilities.

For some sectors, abatement technology does not exist or is too expensive.

The Industry Sector Plan that I released with Minister Chris Bowen last week acknowledges these challenges in an honest and forthright way, and lays out a credible path for how industry can invest in new capital to reduce emissions and become more internationally competitive.

The Commonwealth and the states need to build the modern renewable energy grid faster and address the energy market pressures that could stand in the way of a Future Made in Australia.

The work of my colleagues, Minister Bowen and Minister Madeline King, on the Gas Market Review and the National Electricity Market wholesale market settings review, is particularly important.

As is the work of Minister Murray Watt in reforming environmental approvals that will expedite renewable generation and transmission projects, while protecting Australia’s environment.

The new $5 billion Net Zero Fund within the National Reconstruction Fund, announced last week, will be another tool to support Australian heavy industry to increase energy efficiency, become more productive and to decarbonise, as well as encouraging the scale-up of low emissions technology manufacturing.

I look forward to opening consultation on the Fund in a matter of days.

I’m determined to make it work for industry to meet the kind of objectives that I set out a few minutes ago, in heavy industry terms, in new technology terms, and making a real contribution to Australia’s future economic complexity.  

Conclusion

In aggregate, these initiatives offer a purposeful agenda for lower emissions, more dynamic and productive industries and a more economically resilient Australia.  

This is the core business of government – making choices in the present that enable a better, stronger, fairer and more resilient Australian society.

That’s hard work, and it depends on a huge range of skills and talents, wisdom and expertise, to make it happen.

I am absolutely optimistic – this is an optimistic government – that if Australia’s collective talents are mobilised – and that has to include the talents of our university sector, researchers and policy experts – then Australia will meet the industrial challenge successfully.

Thanks very much.