Reindustrialising for a resilient Australia

I am so grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today in this remarkable College of education and equity, endeavour and achievement.

As a young student of industrial relations at the University of Sydney, I learnt of this College’s place in the education of working Britons and the legions of working-class thinkers, teachers and leaders that you have nurtured and sent into the world.

A place where John Prescott studied.

Where Beatrice Webb has a House named after her.

Where Neil Kinnock, James Callaghan and Tony Blair spoke.

Where EP Thompson picked a fight with what he called the “theoretical terrorism of the structuralist determinists” and carved out a place for agency and human experience in our history and in the making of our world.

So, not just because I have travelled a long way, but also because I am a little daunted by who you all are and the traditions that you represent, I have thought hard about what I should say to you today.

It really is this – 

We live in an age of crisis.

Great geopolitical, technological, demographic, social and industrial forces – let alone pandemics and climate change – are making ordinary people feel as though they have lost control.

The political challenge of our age is to take the social democratic values that shape this College and pursue practical approaches that deliver real change and build stronger, more resilient futures for our countries.

Or more simply: focus on the people, not our opponents.

If we deliver real change that puts people at the centre –

Real change that makes our countries stronger –

Then the politics takes care of itself.

A little of myself to begin.

When people in the UK think of Australia, I think they generally picture Sydney, Melbourne or our stunning coastal communities.

I’m from the inland.

I grew up in northern New South Wales – first on a beef cattle farm, then in Glen Innes, a small town high on the Great Dividing Range, 600 kilometres north of Sydney.

The northern tablelands are high, dry, big sky country – more like Scotland than the bucolic fields, hedgerows and rolling hills of England.

You feel the distance from the city and from the rest of the world.

But the rest of the world has always reached places like Glen Innes.

For generations, wool was shipped to the mills of Yorkshire.

Prices set halfway around the world determined whether families in Glen Innes had a good or bad year.

Henry Lawson, one of Australia’s great poets, understood that dynamic.

“The mighty Bush with iron rails / is tethered to the world.”

That tension, between distance and connection, still shapes Australia.

Communities separated from each other and the rest of the world by enormous distances, but exposed to global economic, geopolitical and technological change all the same.

War and great power conflict, technological disruption, market ruptures, disease and now a changing climate are forces that bear down on all of us. 

But they do not determine our fate.

We do –

By working together to shape the future, rather than submitting to a future made for us by someone else, somewhere else.

Change is relentless.

But communities are resilient and resourceful.

Glen Innes gave me a deep love of place and respect for the power of community.

This anchoring deepened over my career as a trade union official representing working people in the regions and outer suburbs.

People come together in common cause to shape the future when they can see a plan.

When they believe they have options.

When it’s hard, people draw on universal human values.

Hard work.

Taking a knock and getting up again.

Pushing through.

These values are not the property of knuckle-dusting partisans on the left or the right.

And it is these universal values – positive patriotism, building resilience by working together – that social democrats must put at the heart of our efforts to meet the mighty challenges of our age.

The post-1945 order that shaped my early life – one of rules, norms and the steady march of democratic liberalism – is in flux.

There is a land war in Europe.

Bombs rain from the skies in the Middle East.

Autocrats roam the stage, and nations are turning inward.

Inflation is squeezing living standards.

Rising housing costs make the basic promise of a good job, a decent standard of living and a secure home feel increasingly out of reach for young people.

Deindustrialisation has left our economies more vulnerable to shocks.

Overcapacity, unfair subsidies, supply chain concentration and strategic trade restrictions are creating chokepoints and exposing capability vulnerability in advanced economies.

Rapid technological change, particularly in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, is bringing extraordinary opportunity as well as profound questions about risk, power and control.

The scale and speed of change can make people feel powerless.

Populists and nativists feed off this anxiety.

Self-styled strong men and women strut and fret and promise to take back control.

The social democratic answer to this cannot be a competing fantasy: sound and fury, signifying nothing, packaged into a social media reel.

In this place many years ago, the historian E.P. Thompson spoke about agency.

About working people forging their own identity and their own path.

But now, “agency” has been subsumed into the same garbled corporate and bureaucratic-speak that sits alongside words like “social licence”, “engagement” and “empowerment”.

Words so detached from their origin they become meaningless.

As Australian historian and former Labor speechwriter Don Watson has argued, this kind of public language does more than obscure meaning.

It creates distance between governments and the people they are meant to serve.

Populists promise people control with no plan to deliver it.

Giving people control would undermine their business model.

It would require commitment and passion and work.

It would disrupt their grift.

The best answer to empty promises is a plan.

Social democrats are builders – and the Burnham and Albanese Governments are fully intent on generational effort.

Giving people control starts with recognising the power of place. 

Reindustrialising our great industrial regions, drawing on the skill and fortitude of our people.

Putting critical technologies like AI and quantum to work for our economic and national security.

Collaborating to make science and technological advances work for people. 

For me, being the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science in a great country like Australia is the job of a lifetime.

Industrial policy isn’t an arena to stand around admiring problems.

It allows us to shape what’s next.

Your Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, speaks compellingly about deindustrialisation kicking away ladders and killing high streets.

About the value of new industrial clusters and strategic sites driving investment opportunities.

And good growth in every postcode.

About Number 10 North, and all that symbolises.

I feel such deep affinity with this policy thinking.

I understand, I think, exactly where he’s coming from and what he wants to achieve.

But I live in a different country.

Our systems of government have the same origin, but our ways of apportioning power and delivery responsibility are different. 

When your Prime Minister talks about place, and about shifting power away from Westminster to regions and local authorities, I think about our industrial precincts, and how I can work with the states to empower our great industrial regions to keep delivering for Australia.

The core objective is the same: broad, enduring growth that builds productivity, value and new economic opportunity.

In Australia, I’ve been focussed on strengthening and transforming significant industrial facilities like smelters and steel production, because these facilities make our country stronger.

Since the start of 2025, the Albanese Government has stepped in to support eight industrial facilities and their supply chains.

Together, these investments preserve Australia’s capability to process lead, zinc, copper, aluminium and steel and support new production of critical minerals like antimony, germanium and gallium for our industrial and security partners.

These investments also support more than 40,000 jobs across regional Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales.

Back at home, there’s a persistent commentary in our financial press about facility “bailouts” – as if strengthening Australia’s industrial base is an arbitrary act of generosity rather than the execution of a hard-headed and clear-eyed national capability strategy.

This doesn’t trouble me, but I find the narrative perplexing, given many advanced economies are looking at the same world and making the same choices.

Advanced economies are choosing to keep facilities – and the skilled workforces that come with them – by asking different questions than we might have asked a decade ago.

We once stood back and let markets decide.

The first, second and third question used to be: is this facility commercially viable?

That remains a pertinent question, and fiscal prudence matters given all the competing demands on government.

But now we also ask whether the facility is strategically important.

Does it make something we and our partners need?

Does it strengthen a critical supply chain?

Does this capability strengthen economic resilience?

If the answer to these questions is yes – the next question becomes, should we work in partnership with owners and State governments to transform it in a way that delivers long-run value for taxpayers and for the country?

A contested and shock-prone world necessitates different choices for government.

Many of these choices are difficult and costly for stretched systems.

But we can’t allow openness to become dependence.

Hope isn’t a plan.

Winging it isn’t a plan.

Investing in capability is a plan.

We invest in in it because capability gives us control.

Capability gives us options.

We must invest in resilience, but everything is a balance.

Australia is not lurching back to protectionism.

We are not building a fortress.

We cannot save every embattled facility or build everything ourselves – no country can.

But we can combine market economics and open trade with public partnerships and considered interventions to make Australia stronger, smarter and safer.

Resilience means having options: sovereign capability where it matters, trusted partners where our capabilities complement each other and diverse supply chains that keep critical things moving.

Australia has extraordinary advantages. 

Minerals. 

Rare earths.

Iron ore, copper and aluminium in vast quantities.

Proximity to the fastest growing region of the world in human history.

Skilled workers, world-class scientific and research capability, and industrial regions with generations of accumulated experience.

The task before Australia is to build new sources of competitive advantage from those strengths.

To process more critical minerals in Australia and capture that value.

To use Australian ore, Australian energy and Australian science to build a competitive green iron industry.

Whyalla Steelworks is our industrial past and our future. 

The earth is red, the furnaces and machinery are enormous, and the heat can make the place feel otherworldly.

The steelworks dominate a solitary town that sits alone in the Outback.

You may have heard of Sanjeev Gupta.

In Australia we learnt of him at enormous cost.

He and his steel firms have acted like a wrecking ball through Australia’s heavy industry.

Expropriating funds in unethical transfers and underinvestment in capital and maintenance brought this Outback industrial facility to its knees. 

But it isn’t the corporate vandalism of a national asset that stays with me.

It is the determination, courage and perseverance of the Australians who fought so hard to keep the blast furnace operating against enormous odds.

Heroic.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Labor governments backed their efforts, but years of underinvestment by the previous owner had taken their toll, and ultimately the furnace was beyond repair.

That does not mean giving up on Whyalla.

The Albanese and Malinauskas Labor Governments are backing its transition to the next generation of Australian steelmaking.

We have not walked away.

We have a plan for transformation. 

Britain faced its own version of that choice at the steelworks in Scunthorpe.

Shut down the UK’s last blast furnaces or retain local steelmaking capability.

The UK Labour Government made the decision to recall Parliament on a Saturday to keep the furnaces burning.

Two Labor governments, on opposite sides of the world, confronting different industrial crises, but animated by the same basic proposition.

Some capabilities are too important to surrender without a fight.

And we look to the resilience and stoicism of industrial communities to inspire that fight.

Strength is not all industrial.

We need to bring the same strategies for resilience, capability and control to technology.

Artificial intelligence is the consequential technology of our generation.

But we should be just as wary of technological determinism today as E.P. Thompson was of structural determinism in his time.

There is nothing inevitable about how AI develops, who controls it or who captures the wealth it creates.

These are decisions for people, institutions and governments.

In his encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, Pope Leo argues that technology is never neutral.

He describes AI as a construction site where we will build either a Tower of Babel, centring vanity, profit and self-interest over humanity, or Jerusalem – technology built around human purposes and human dignity.

Even without a religious education I am for the Jerusalem option!

Australia chooses AI with people at the centre.

Technology needs to solve human problems, strengthen our communities, make our industries more competitive and our economies more resilient.

Australia is building a world-leading regulatory approach that enhances human dignity, lifts national capability and gives Australia agency in the AI economy.

An approach that preserves our unique culture and values, while capturing economic and security benefits.

While dealing decisively with safety, including in partnership with the excellent UK AI Security Institute.

This landscape is evolving rapidly but Australia’s roadmap is clear: set standards, create opportunity and manage risk.

Resilience comes from things we have – energy, materials, water, capability.

It comes from people rejecting apathy, disaffection, doomscrolling or nihilism.

E.P. Thompson wrote that the English working class “was present at its own making.”

Working people have a long and proud history of shaping events.

And working people have not felt a compulsion to perform their own patriotism.

I am indebted to Marc Stears’ beautiful book “Out of the Ordinary” for articulating what I lacked the language to say. 

Written during his interregnum Down Under, it is a very English book.

Stears finds enduring social democracy and British patriotism in ordinary lives: daily routines, family and community tribulations, and the way ordinary Britons faced the War and reconstructed their country.

That insight, to me, feels so potent.

The louder, angrier, and more uncertain the world becomes, the hungrier we get for the places and rituals that anchor our lives.

Quiet human endurance abides through cycles of performative, pyrotechnic politics.

This endurance is the foundation of our Labor movement – history shows us this.

Genuine patriotism comes from attachment to a real country: its people, its places, its institutions and its future.

Confected patriotism uses the symbols of a nation while abandoning the people and capabilities that really constitute Australia today.

We see confected patriotism in both our countries.

The offer of grievance instead of a plan, and division instead of a country to build.

There is nothing patriotic about making your country weak.

There is nothing patriotic about surrendering its industrial capability.

And there is certainly nothing patriotic about undermining the democratic institutions built by generations of ordinary people.

The Australian bush Henry Lawson described was tethered to the world. 

Modern Australia is more connected to it than he could ever have imagined.

The answer is not to break those connections, or to pretend we can hold back economic, technological or cultural change.

We can’t retreat. 

But we can shape what comes next.

Resilience isn’t innate.

It’s built.

In families, neighbourhoods and nations.

We make it together.

By harnessing the capabilities of tradespeople, production workers and engineers, firms and unions and local communities in a great nation-building task.

By reviving and future-proofing industrial capability and community.

By harnessing technology for people.

By imbuing national effort with positive patriotism.

By valuing perseverance and forbearance of ordinary people.

By celebrating and cherishing the ordinary –

And strengthening democracy that delivers real change people can believe in.