Introduction and acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Wurundjeri People and pay my respects to Elders past and present. 

I extend that acknowledgment to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People here today.

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have practised adaptability and innovation as a matter of culture and technology – in fishing and aquaculture, in land use and resource management.  

Last week, the Chief Scientist and I visited Budj Bim, the Cultural Landscape of the Gunditjmara people in South-western Victoria, where the earliest examples of aquaculture technologies, tens of kilometres long and more than 6,000 years old, are found. 

Rangers Tyson Lovett-Murray, Jakobe Walker and Aaron Morgan, along with Uncle Denis Rose, took us on an incredible tour through the area. 

The Gunditjmara recovered their Native Title rights to Budj Bim in 2007 and have worked through the generations to secure UNESCO Heritage listing, repair the health of Lake Condah, and care for that remarkable Country. 

Imagine the obstacles put in their way and the guts, perseverance and cultural authority required for that decades-long struggle. 

I think that’s a useful reminder to all of us that, in the fast-paced, constantly changing modern global economy, there’s still so much we can learn from the ingenuity and resilience, science and technology of the First Australians, who have been adapting and improving technologies on this continent for 60,000 years. 

And I’ve had the privilege today of seeing some of the work that’s underway at RMIT to embed that principle in cutting-edge research and teaching processes – the Indigenous Virtual Reality headsets that I engaged with today are truly remarkable. 

It's a tribute to RMIT that there are so many leaders from industry, the trade union movement, from government, the professions and the not-for-profit sector here tonight.  

I want to acknowledge my friend Professor Johanna Macneil. I’ve followed Jo’s work over the years – her research work, originally in industrial relations. 

Australia, at this moment, needs to recover the muscle memory of how it is that institutions cooperate. Whether that’s in the world of work or in the broader pluralist context that this day has been focused on. I know that Jo’s continuing that work in another context here and making a really important contribution.   

My parliamentary colleague Sarah Witty is here today as well. We were here just a few weeks ago to celebrate Australia’s first moon-rover. 

I want to acknowledge the leadership team at RMIT University, led by Vice-Chancellor and President Alec Cameron – it’s been wonderful to meet with you again today. 

And to all of the RMIT researchers who are speaking about or showcasing their work at this remarkable festival – I want to acknowledge you tonight as well. 

It’s really fitting to be talking about technology, innovation and its social impact at an institution like this one. 

RMIT remains rightly proud of its formative history as a workers’ college – the Working Men’s College as it was – fostering quality technical training and encouraging the ‘cultivation of the mind’, as the motto puts it, for the working people of Melbourne. 

The transformation of this institution from technical college to influential technology university reflects the growing premium that Australia has placed on research and technological development over the post-war period. 

But RMIT’s enduring conviction – which I very much share – is that technological development is not the preserve of scientists, managers and entrepreneurs alone, but rather a whole-of-society endeavour that depends on the participation of working people. 

What is Innovation? 

The theme of this year’s Festival is “Fair, Innovative and Resilient Australian Futures”. 

Each of those terms – fairness, innovation and resilience – are at the forefront of the work I’m engaged in as Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science in the Albanese Labor Government to rejuvenate Australian industry and prepare Australia for the opportunities of the high-technology, low-carbon future that’s on the horizon.  

But of those three terms, it’s the second - “innovation” - that’s most commonly misunderstood. 

It often evokes images of tech bros and black skivvies, or robots taking jobs, or technological agendas imposed from above on the broader community. 

If you’ll allow me a slightly partisan observation – the public’s mild ambivalence toward innovation wasn’t helped by a decade of policy inconsistency and mixed messaging under our predecessors. 

In those years, innovation was a prolific buzzword one day, maligned as a misguided ‘frolic’ the next. 

That inconsistency was a disservice to the nation, because innovation is vital for Australian prosperity, resilience and living standards, and our capacity to solve national problems. And it requires clarity of purpose.  

So let me say a bit about how I understand innovation. 

Innovation is how we marshal the skills and ideas, the institutional and industrial capabilities, of a community in response to big challenges. 

Innovation is about finding the scientific and technical solutions that have real-world impacts on the way people live, work and learn.  

It’s not just invention – that’s a subset, of innovation. 

Innovation is how ideas become knowledge, which drives technology, expands human capabilities and creates the conditions for national resilience. 

It is how we collectively turn challenge into opportunity. 

And it’s how we learn from the setbacks that are, inevitably, part of the research and development process. 

Cast in these terms, innovation is more than just a driver of productivity – though it certainly is that. 

And more than just a route to greater scientific and technological capability – though it is that, too. 

It’s a moral proposition – it’s about coordinating talent that advances society as a whole, not just the inventors who do the experimenting or the investors who make the down-payments on commercialisation.   

And it shouldn’t just empower the researchers and managers in Australia’s industrial and research systems.  

There’s no innovation without working people. There’s no long-term technological improvement or productivity uplift without the buy-in of ordinary Australians who, quite often, do the actual innovating. 

It’s about advancing the human condition, lifting living standards, finding solutions to human problems. 

Innovation in the Australian context

Australia is built on an incredibly rich tradition of innovation and adaptability. 

Australia’s self-mythologies tend to locate ‘innovation’ within the trope of the ‘Aussie bushman’. People like Russel Ward and Manning Clark have a bit to answer for here. 

In that telling, Australian innovation – or more accurately, inventiveness – largely involved individual men in the Bush, tinkering with and adapting foreign technologies to suit often harsh Australian conditions. 

It’s true that Australia owed much – and still does – to the research and innovative agility of people who work directly on the land. 

But we shouldn’t ignore the major innovations that were developed beyond the farm gate. 

Like Mephan Ferguson, a nineteenth-century blacksmith-turned-contractor who developed the wrought-iron piping that transformed Melbourne’s waterways and even connected Kalgoorlie with Perth’s water supply.  

Eugène D. Nicolle, the French-born, Sydney-based refrigeration engineer whose groundbreaking refrigeration technologies helped preserve food in the home and facilitated long-distance domestic meat trade. 

His entrepreneurial patron Thomas Sutcliffe Mort commercialised and maximised those breakthroughs, though not without losses along the way. 

Dozens more Australian innovations transformed our industrial economy and went out into the world to shape our trading partners’ economies too. 

Meeting the challenge of the tyranny of distance with novel and creative technological solutions. 

Improved living standards for those connected to better waterways and better food preservation systems.  

Good jobs for the thousands of tradesmen and labourers who laid and installed pipes or manufactured early refrigeration and food transport systems. 

And big spillover benefits for parts of the economy that benefited from better water access or better capability to meet food demand at a distance.  

In the twentieth century, the pace of Australian innovation accelerated as manufacturing grew its share of GDP, and as external challenges like war and depression made domestic industrial research and development crucial. 

The mission to combat distance and remoteness yielded further achievement in Australia, most famously Wi-Fi technology. 

The mission to lift living standards and improve quality of life for all Australians led to major medical technology breakthroughs – the cochlear implant, the CPAP breathing machine and more. 

And today, there are new innovations being developed that will give Australia world-leading capabilities in a range of industries, from critical minerals processing and clean iron and steel production to advanced medical manufacturing. 

Discoveries happen every day in Australia’s research institutes, universities and institutions like the CSIRO. 

And in the private sector, too, where the industrial democracy of Australian workers, engineers, scientists, supervisors and managers develop tens of thousands of process and technological innovations every year that make work better, its processes more productive.  

I have seen it every day of my working life in thousands of blue-collar and engineering workplaces all across Australia. 

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen it at firms like Precision Oxycut in Western Sydney, and Prince Engineering in South-west Victoria – where blue-collar workers are driving technological improvement and industrial productivity. 

I will see more tomorrow in Dandenong with Julian Hill, Member for Bruce, and in Chisolm with their federal MP, Dr Carina Garland. 

A role for government

Innovation is done by ordinary Australians, not done to them. 

Those relationships – between workers and firms, inventors and investors, the industrial end-users, and of course, government too – are what drive economic change. 

It’s been thirty-five years since Bob Hawke, in his policy speech for the 1990 election, set out his vision for how Australia could become the ‘clever country’. 

And it was an ambitious vision, featuring Cooperative Research Centres that brought public and private investment together to meet shared challenges, increase research capability and support good jobs in Australian science and industry. 

These kinds of investments are still driving forward Australia’s high-tech capabilities – quantum computing is a good example of this. 

What Hawke could not have foreseen was the broader deindustrialisation and declining economic complexity that has characterised Australia in recent decades. 

Declining economic complexity, declining manufacturing and declining firm size has led to declining research intensity and, ultimately, declining productivity performance. 

Less manufacturing, less innovation, less research and development and a starving innovation system – just when we need R&D (public and private), innovation and productivity to be at their strongest to meet our era-defining climate, energy and security challenges. 

A consequential time indeed to be the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science. 

I am acutely aware of the leadership role I must play here to support and align our existing innovation and research and development systems in the national interest. 

Strategic Examination of Research & Development

One of the things that’s already underway in my portfolio – and I pay tribute to my predecessor, Ed Husic, for his leadership in the last term on this question – is the Albanese Government’s nation-wide Strategic Examination of Research and Development (SERD). 

Led by Robyn Denholm, the SERD panel is evaluating no fewer than 470 submissions from research organisations and industry end-users. 

Their report will come to me by the end of the year, and I don’t want to disrespect the panel by pre-empting its conclusions in any way. 

But some core principles are already emerging from the process. 

Australia’s research activities need to be better coordinated than they are today. 

It’s widely appreciated that Australia has some of the best researchers in the world. 

Our researchers rank 3rd among OECD countries in academic performance, and 2nd in highly cited publications. 

Some of the institutions and facilities across Australia’s research ecosystem are absolutely world-class. 

But sometimes, lack of strategic focus can stand in the way of targeted investment in the skills and facilities that Australian innovation really needs. 

And in the way of opportunities for research translation and commercialisation that Australia has too often missed or failed to take up.  

To use an AFL analogy to suck up to my principally Victorian audience here, Australia is kicking goals when it comes to research and development, but only behinds when it comes to onshore commercialisation.

There are 160-odd Commonwealth programs spanning 14 portfolios of government. 

All of that effort is worthwhile, but there is often fragmentation across that system – and the parts do not always speak to the whole. 

I’ve said elsewhere that while the quantity of investment in research and development does matter – and I note that private sector investment has been declining over some time – it really is the quality and the coherence of effort that makes an R&D system successful. 

I’m serious about the role of government here. It’s not just about investing in research capabilities and the commercialisation of discoveries. 

It’s about providing the kind of leadership that helps to align the effort and ingenuity that’s already abundant in our research system. 

Innovation and a Future Made in Australia

In particular, I want to see Australian research and innovation effort aligned to meet the urgent strategic priorities that are articulated in the Albanese Government’s Future Made in Australia agenda. 

That agenda is about maximising the benefits of Australia’s move to a low-carbon economy and making sure that carbon-intensive industries and the communities around them can make the most of that historic shift. 

Using industry policy to help build a more cohesive, resilient Australian society that’s confident in the face of external challenges. 

This is an economic challenge. A social challenge. A strategic challenge. And a science and technology challenge as well. 

The Future Made in Australia agenda is a $22.7 billion investment that turns these challenges into opportunity. 

It’s the biggest pro-manufacturing agenda in Australia’s history. 

It is larger, in real terms, than the combined costs of building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the original Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme and the Wivenhoe Dam in Brisbane.² 

That reflects not just the seriousness of our commitment, but also the ideals underscoring it – an ambition to strengthen Australia’s industrial capabilities, economic prosperity, strategic resilience and quality of life.   

And like those earlier uplifting projects, the Future Made in Australia agenda should create good, accessible and skilled jobs for Australians. 

But those jobs won’t simply materialise. They will only come about if Australian know-how and problem-solving is encouraged to develop new technologies for making, refining and processing Australia’s mineral resources into Australian metal products for our industrial and trading partners. 

That means more value adding, lower global emissions in carbon-intensive industrial processes and a more economically and strategically resilient Australia in a less certain world. 

There’s a whole range of levers and instruments that the Albanese Government is using to fashion that low-carbon, clean manufacturing future for Australia. 

There are production tax incentives, a $2 billion Green Aluminium Production Credit, and new Funds under the Future Made agenda to drive public and private investment in low-carbon iron production, clean metal technologies and low carbon liquid fuels. 

It’s an Australian mission – a national mission of real consequence that will mobilise and engage the talents of Australians who are engaged in manufacturing and steelmaking, critical minerals processing, public science and research institutions.  

The CSIRO is crucial here, and they are working with another key institution, the Heavy Industry Low-carbon Transition (HILT) Cooperative Research Centre, to lead a Green Metals Innovation Network.  

I say all of this to say that getting our innovation system right involves Australians and Australian institutions working together, with the government providing strategic leadership. 

That’s why I announced last week the creation of a $5 billion Net Zero Fund within the National Reconstruction Fund. 

We’re going to get on with the process of designing that fund for maximum impact over the coming days. 

Conclusion

To succeed in this national mission, Australia must make the most of its entire stock of skills and capabilities as we work to decarbonise industry and secure our place in a more economically and strategically competitive world. 

There’s no part of Australian society that doesn’t have a place in that effort. 

Innovation and decarbonisation will require workers in blue-collar as well as white-collar occupations. 

Migrants as well as those born in Australia. Women and girls as well as boys and men. Regional and outer-suburban communities as well as those working in our cities. 

That whole of society effort is a uniquely social democratic challenge to meet this historical moment. 

To build the industries that position Australia for our competitive and comparative advantages with our mineral endowment and vast solar, wind, gas and storage resources as the world goes to low and zero emissions by 2050. 

To deliver the economic and industrial resilience required of us to make Australia more secure in a more contested and volatile world with more great power competition than at any time since the 1950s. 

And to do all of that in a uniquely Australian way that strengthens the popular, regional and institutional dimensions of our Australian democracy. 

I know that RMIT is doing its part to provide the knowledge, research, and industry partnerships that help achieve that national mission. 

Together, Australian workers, researchers and industry can build an Australia that shapes its own future rather than waiting for others to shape it, and an Australia where no community is left behind. 

Thanks very much.