UOW Research Blog

Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss and Minister for Industries Ian Macfarlane discuss the fallout of the Holden closure. But does it mean the death of Australian manufacturing? Daniel Munoz/AAP

By Professors Chris Gibson and Geoffrey Spinks – this post originally appeared in the Conversation (12/12/13)

An unfortunate consequence of Holden and Ford’s decision to cease manufacturing cars in Australia is the negative impression that all local manufacturing is similarly doomed. Yet there are plenty of local manufacturers that are doing well. We just don’t hear much about them.

Can we learn their secrets for success? Can these ideas be promulgated throughout the industry and help arrest the overall decline in manufacturing’s contribution to employment and the economy? Can we build new industries to fill the void left by the exit of Ford and GMH and can we do it quickly?

Our manufacturers can compete globally

One clear feature of many successful local manufacturers is that they tend to operate in niche markets. But being niche doesn’t mean they are necessarily small. Cochlear Limited, for example, makes the bionic ear: a highly specialised, niche product that provides hearing to the profoundly deaf. In 30 years of operation the company has grown to employ 2700 people worldwide with 800 manufacturing employees, many of whom are based in Sydney.

On a smaller scale, but with a similar upward growth trajectory is Røde Microphones – a private company that makes high quality microphones for the world market. The company employs around 200 people and recently doubled its Sydney based manufacturing facility. Strong export growth over the last decade has also been seen in scientific and medical instruments and pharmaceuticals. These examples demonstrate that Australian firms can compete globally.

Exploiting advantages

A close connection with customers who seek customised products is one of several competitive advantages that can be exploited by Australian-based manufacturers.

Mining equipment manufacturers, for example, work closely with mine operators to design, manufacture and maintain bespoke mining equipment. Here it is essential for the makers to go on site, understand the problem and collaboratively develop solutions through regular communication with the customer.

Defence contractor Thales Australia manufactures a range of systems in regional centres including the Bushmaster troop carrier designed to meet the specific requirements of the Australian Defence Force. The company recently announced export sales to Jamaica.

Similarly, our custom-made surfboard industry survives in the face of stiff competition from imported, mass-produced boards by understanding the needs of surfers.

Australia’s natural resources provide opportunities for the development of mineral products, processed foods and forestry products. We are geographically positioned on the doorstep of the growth economies of Asia. There are many reasons to be positive about the future of manufacturing in Australia.

Continuous innovation

One key requirement for a sustainable manufacturing is the capacity of firms to innovate. Many of the successful local manufacturers heavily invest in R&D.

Cochlear Limited engages with over 100 universities worldwide and has located its headquarters at Macquarie University. Thales Australia is a founding member of the Defence Materials Technology Centre and supported work at the University of Wollongong on automated welding systems that was part of the recently awarded 2013 Eureka prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia. Røde Microphones has developed innovative marketing strategies to introduce its products to the music industry and was awarded the 2013 NSW Premier’s Export Award.

Innovation comes in many forms and can include technology, management and marketing strategies and the greater use of design principles to enhance product value. These activities are not always mutually exclusive – the introduction of new manufacturing processes like robots or 3D printers can require modifications to the business model, for example. The research sector is beginning to appreciate these interconnections and form interdisciplinary teams such as the University of Wollongong’s Global Challenge Programin Manufacturing Innovation.

If innovation is so important, how can it be made more efficient? Steven Johnson’s book“Where good ideas come from” (2010, Penguin, New York) has identified the conditions that favour innovation.

Essentially, it’s all about getting people together from diverse backgrounds with ready exchange of ideas and information; to provide time to absorb and process the information and “connect the dots”; and look for innovations in what Johnson calls the “adjacent possible” – that is, the introduction of new ideas that are a small, logical step from existing practises. These innovations are the most easily recognised and easily implemented with immediate effect. In this respect, it’s clear that clusters of like-minded businesses benefit from being physically located in close proximity to one another.

MIT recently released the findings of its study (Making in America, 2013) into the state of manufacturing in the US and highlighted the need to accelerate ideas to products. Again, focused activities and collaborative networks are identified as a successful innovation strategy.

Forward-looking governments

Are we doing enough to foster innovation and growth in Australian manufacturing?

The Manufacturing Excellence Taskforce Australia (formerly known as the Manufacturing Innovation Precinct) established by the former federal government aims to establish networks between manufacturers and research providers, but it’s too early to assess the impact.

What we need are forward-looking governments that are willing to invest in developing new niche, manufacturing industries and provide support for existing SMEs to grow.

While there are examples of these processes occurring organically, central governments have a role to accelerate the process and overcome the barriers to innovation like access to capital, skills, facilities, R&D costs and uncertain outcomes.

In both Germany and China, the state has had a significant role to play in supporting advanced manufacturing growth. Our universities and other research agencies like CSIRO are generating great manufacturing-related research outcomes but, ultimately, governments are needed for the necessary investments to get these good ideas translated into industries.

By Dr Georgine Clarson – first published in the Conversation (12/12/13)

Yesterday we learned that our collective support for Holden is coming to an end. The demise of “Australia’s Own” has been on the cards for years. After all, this country is one of the most expensive places in the world to produce cars.

We are not alone or even the biggest subsidisers of car manufacturing, of course.

National economies as different as China, Japan, France and the USA have always offered incentives to keep cars rolling off assembly lines. But public funding for private enterprise runs deep in Australia – and it has never been just a matter of economics.

Subsidising the Australian dream

From the earliest years of British occupation, we cobbled together an Australian version of capitalism that collectively fostered and protected industries big and small.

Colonial authorities gave away land, seed, free labour, and licenses to trade in rum, run a ferry service or fish the harbour. In the 19th century colonies built railway lines and ports for miners and pastoralists, as well as dams, artesian bores and telegraph lines.

And in the 20th century there was wide support for government-nurtured infrastructures and enterprises, from banks and telecommunications companies, the Snowy Mountains Schemeand, yes, the first GMH plant in Fishermans Bend in 1936.

Such initiatives were seen as innovative and distinctively Australian ways to grow a modern settler society. They were designed not just to secure prosperity but also to create a more harmonious and equitable nation than the one we had left behind.

Cars for a rugged landscape

Australians are known as early and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies.

The first cars were quickly drawn into the prevailing confidence that technology was the solution for problems of settling the continent and learning to belong in the landscape. Cities were their natural habitat, but well before cars were up to the job, conversations turned to how useful they would be in the arid back country, where water and horse feed was scarce.

Over the next decades, as the new nation was finding its feet, automobile “overlanders” became a new kind of popular hero as they drove – and pushed and dragged – their machines into places they were not designed for. Overlanding pioneers were greatly admired for opening out the “vast blank places on the map” to white settlement and, after the second world war, to recreation and tourism.

Cars and Australia emerged at the same time and the utilitarian value of cars helped to create a national car culture with a different emphasis.

More than an item of frivolous city consumption, an object of leisure and fashion, or means of display for the ultra wealthy, early Australian car culture also spoke to more patriotic sentiments. There was an affinity between cars and the development of the nation that made them central to how life on this continent would be imagined and lived.

Like steam engines on the Great Plains of America in the 19th century, images of cars grinding across the spinifex plains of the Central Desert – with the obligatory Aboriginal warrior leaning on his spear and watching from the distance – became emblematic of the ways cars were becoming integral to our sense of ourselves.

Holden cars opened up the Australian landscape

A mobile and masculine citizenry

There was much talk about how how the movement of cars was reshaping the continent and creating a mobile citizenry. After the second world war, the special place cars held in national culture was institutionalised in the hugely popular decision to fund an all-Australian car. Holden soon captured half of the market.

But the great enthusiasm that greeted the first Holden sedans in the 1950s was only peripherally related to factors such as national development, full employment, or the security benefits of industrial self-sufficiency.

Seen from a different angle, the utilitarian value of the Holden was a story that helped to deflect attention from the less rational emotions and values that gave cars their immense power in our lives. It diverted eyes away from the reality that this item of mass consumption was saturated with meanings beyond the nuts and bolts of the thing itself and its function as a means of transport.

As much as Holden advertisements used images of women to signify their stylishness, as much as Australian women, too, had ambitions to drive them, and as much as Holdens were marketed as family cars, they were predominantly in the hands of men.

Men who did not yet own a Holden could dream of that happy day.

Here was a prized commodity that altered practices and ideas of Australian masculinity. Men were no longer only the producers of goods, but in an era of growing national prosperity, they were increasingly defined through what they consumed and how they did it.

A new mode of consumption

Unlike feminine consumption, which had been long established as domestic and frivolous, car consumption was not mere passive consuming. Cars seemed to be about much more important and exciting things – mastering machinery, conquering the “tyranny of distance” and acquiring new knowledge and skills.

Holdens were at the heart of those changes.

Proud Australian expressions of masculinity that cut across class differences were built around Holden FXs and FJsin the Redex reliability trialsand the Monaros, Toranasand Commodores on the Mountain.

Masculinity was even reinvented behind the steering wheel of the maligned suburban Kingswood.

Throughout the era of baby-boomer optimism, visions of men in Holdens trailing plumes of dust on dirt tracks, finding happiness in just burning miles or bush bashing, or the joy of taking the family on a long drive to the beach seemed to define a settler Australian birthright.

The end of the Holden era

Later generations grew up with a much more mundane experience of cars.

Their investments in technology appear to be very different. Studies suggest that young men and women now are more passionate about digital connectivity than their driving licenses.

Cars are more androgynous objects, and masculinity and femininity is much less bound up with the things we do with them. Their global manufacture, design and marketing rarely invoke national sensibilities. Developments such as automatic braking systems have taken over functions from the driver – and the idea that Dad might change the oil filter on the front lawn is barely thinkable.

Not only is there little political clout in the conviction that maintaining employment and sustaining working class communities deserves collective investment, but old fantasies of gunning down the wide open road in “Australia’s Own” no longer resonate in national dreams.

Perhaps that is part of the grief that many are feeling.

FURTHER READING:

• Moving on: Holden closure shows we need a new growth agenda
• Walking away from Holden: Abbott finishes what Hewson started
• Holden to cease making cars in Australia by 2017: experts react

Governments are failing to keep up with infrastructure demands, but are tolls the answer?

By Garry Bowditch

This post originally appeared on the Conversation

Australia spends more on infrastructure today than at any stage in its history. Yet governments are unable to meet demand and don’t expect ever to do so. What can governments do to keep up with escalating demand and community expectations for infrastructure?

Reserve Bank assistant governor Philip Lowe says tolls and levies could be the answer to more efficiently funding the transport infrastructure we need – infrastructure he says would boost productivity and improve living standards.

Tolls are just one issue likely to be debated as part of the Productivity Commission’s current inquiry into infrastructure costs, which is considering how infrastructure is funded and financed by both the Commonwealth and the states.

Governments trying to fix the infrastructure backlog face a number of constraints including money, suitable land access and community buy-in.

Historically, Australia is a large investor in infrastructure with per capita spending of about A$18,500 pa in the past decade. This means the nation has pulled ahead of the OECD, reflecting two mining booms and nation building public spending.

Gridlock frustrates

At the same time congestion in Australia’s major cities continues to escalate with gridlock on roads impacting passenger and freight logistics. This situation reflects poorly on project selection processes and willingness to choose infrastructure that lifts national productivity. For example, renovating existing infrastructure and shifting demand from the peak to the shoulder period can often have superior productivity impacts compared with building greenfield assets.

While Australia has a strong case to build more infrastructure, it must do so with a great deal more discipline and clear purpose towards the long term national interest.

Prioritising projects with the highest cost benefit ratios is fundamental. At the same time we must recognise that Australia has erred on this front, which has come at a cost to the public. These projects are typically in the category “too much, too late,” such as gold plating electricity distribution networks on the east coast and the South East Queensland water grid.

If more road and public transport investment is to occur, governments should also focus on how they will service private capital during the long period of investment in infrastructure. This means a willingness to allow prices to reflect full cost recovery for the infrastructure provided, permit prices to reflect the incentive to invest and where appropriate use the government’s balance sheet to fund shadow tolls where a user charge is not appropriate.

Productivity matters

Better infrastructure for Australia should be anchored by a clear objective of lifting national productivity. This clarity of objective has been missing which has made it difficult for governments to be purposeful and consistent in their infrastructure decisions.

To that end the regulatory system requires reform, as it must provide the right price signals and incentives to make the best use of existing infrastructure. Tolls and user charges can have a more fundamental role to play in shaping demand and helping to direct where investment is needed to lift productivity growth.

Of course a toll should always be a fee for a defined level of service, and the community has the right to expect choice in the services available. The problem is that infrastructure often fails this test to the detriment of business and the community.

Tolls need to be justified

It is notable that the M1, M2, M4 and M5 toll roads in Sydney all originally demonstrated great benefit to commuters with faster travel time. But the reality is that now each of these toll roads has a peak hour exceeding 10 hours per day; slow speed and uncertain travel time is the norm.

To address this situation, state and federal infrastructure agencies need to enshrine customer service benchmarks that govern lifetime performance of major assets and networks. Government and the private sector concession holders will then require a framework to sustain them together.

The Australian community expects globally competitive transit times during the peak hour. Using tolls to help fund transport infrastructure is reasonable but without service benchmarks commuters are not assured of value for money; a toll becomes just another tax.

Tolls and user charges are not a panacea without fundamental institutional reform. Infrastructure must perform a service to the community that is relevant and compelling in order to justify a user charge in the first place. This is one of the missing ingredients to a better infrastructure future for Australia.

Garry Bowditch is the CEO of UOW’s Smart Infrastructure Facility

By Dr Siobhan McHugh

In a cultural milieu dominated by long-form television dramas such as Breaking Bad and Madmen, how has the apparently simple activity of audio storytelling gained such clout?

In the US, documentary radio programs such as RadioLab, This American Life and Radio Diaries enjoy sold-out stage shows telling real-life stories that combine serious journalism with compelling personal narratives, philosophical discourse and an irreverent but always engaging tone.

The “new wave” of US radio often features at the hugely popular Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago. Julie Shapiro, curator since the festival’s inception in 2000, told me once, when I interviewed her, that “there’s a whole perfect storm” happening to make audio storytelling sexy: podcasting, ease of digital recording and production, and use of social media to promote and disseminate stories.

Shapiro coined Third Coast’s key tenet: “important radio can sound beautiful”. Such a view was a radical antidote to the turgid, formulaic reportage that had infected much of US public radio, whereby “documentary” had become associated with “worthy”.

Movies for radio

The revolution gained traction in 1995 when the American radio personality Ira Glass co-founded This American Life, a one-hour narrative journalism show.

Glass refuses to use the term documentary:

because [it] sounds like it’s going to be boring. Heavy. Not entertaining. Even I hold my breath a little before tuning in to a documentary program, and I make documentaries for a living.

Glass’s “movies-for-radio” approach has been a spectacular success, with more than 2 million listeners a week for This American Life on more than 500 public radio stations in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany and the US, and a further million podcasts on iTunes.

RadioLab, another cult hit, also employs a three-act theatrical model with a tightly-scripted spontaneous feel. Much of its charm derives from the riffing between the urbane Robert Krulwich and the musically creative Jad Abumrad, who interact in micro-produced, fast-paced stories loosely related to science, culture and philosophy, crafted as finely layered slivers of voice and composed acoustic.

“They’re playful … they challenge how you’re used to hearing scientific topics, complicated things, talked about,” Shapiro told me. “But mostly it’s skill, chemistry and a little bit of magic, really.”

A recent RadioLab episode, Blame, features a deeply affecting tale about an elderly man, Hector, who develops a close relationship with the crack addict who raped and killed his daughter.

In print, Hector’s story would seem unbelievable, almost perverted. As television, we would be drawn to the differences in colour, age, background, of the grieving white father and the jailed black murderer: appearance trumping story.

As audio, Hector’s warmth is paramount:

I’m 86, almost 86 and a half: when you get as old as I am, you add the half again like you did when you were three.

As Hector tries to understand why his daughter died, writing letters to her killer, we listen, enthralled, as he reads both sides of an aching correspondence.

Driveway moments

Even film-makers allow that audio, being less intrusive, can elicit deeply revealing content that film cannot: for his recent film The Darkside, Indigenous director Warwick Thornton used audio recordings because, in his view, “as soon as you put a camera in front of people, they clam up”.

Besides facilitating the expression of deep emotion, audio engenders a visceral response in listeners, engaging both head and heart. This creates what radio producers call “driveway moments”, where listeners can’t leave their car because they’re so caught up in a story.

I’m told I caused one such moment when an Australian journalist, Jan Graham, described the awful intimacy of a GI’s last moments during the Vietnam war, in my documentary Minefields and Miniskirts.

When Jan’s story appeared in print, and even when the same words were spoken by a very good actor in a stage adaptation, they were vastly less moving than the raw and wrenching emotion captured on tape. You can judge for yourself here.

Collective listening

The Third Coast International Audio Festival boldly challenges the cultural dominance of movies by staging a Filmless festival, at which audiences gather just as in a cinema, for “screenings” of selected audio documentaries.

It’s a powerful experience, akin to the charge of a live concert. Filmless has spawned spin-off events: in the UK, the In the Dark movement presents “sonic delights” at museums, cinemas, and pubs, while In the Dark Australia sees audio devotees in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide gather in churches, gardens and other atmospheric venues for collective listening events.

The whimsical, compelling personal stories of the US “new wave” are attracting young listeners in Australia. ABC Radio National has a long tradition of innovative audio – auteurs such as Tony Barrell and Kaye Mortley were making radio “movies” when Ira Glass was still a radio rookie.

ABC RN is fostering a crossover zone between audio art and radio journalism via its new Creative Audio Unit, whose recent recruitment drive for producers who can work across “genres such as features, performance, music, documentaries” attracted 85 applicants for one job.

Despite its long-predicted demise, radio ain’t dead yet.
Siobhan McHugh is the founding editor of RadioDoc Review, the first international journal devoted to reviews of audio storytelling, which launches this week.

This post originally appeared on the Conversation blog on 12 December 2013.

*This article was originally published by The Australian 

He hit me on the kerb of a road and I fell backwards on to the road. I was extremely lucky. I had a backpack on, which broke my fall. Although my nose bled copiously I had no real damage.

My nose was not broken, I did not lose any teeth and my eyes were not damaged. No car came along to run me over. If I had not had a backpack on, I could easily have cracked my head. There must have been a guardian angel looking out for me.

What distressed me after the event was the role of the police. A shop owner who had witnessed the event rang the ambulance and the police. The ambulance turned up quickly and treated my injuries and advised me to have an X-ray for my nose.

The police turned up only just as I was about to drive off with the ambulance to where my wife had left the car at the railway station. The police were decidedly uninterested in what had happened.

Having taken so long to arrive, they knew that my attacker was long gone and that I would have problems identifying him. However, as the attack had taken place near a methadone clinic, it was fairly certain that a drug addict had committed the offence. This had to be the case as my attacker made no attempt to rob me; he was probably just high. Surely the police had an idea who the junkies in town were.

Grudgingly they agreed to take a statement from me. After cleaning up and having an X-ray I went to the police station and they took a statement. That was the last that I heard from them. I suffered no trauma from the assault and subsequently had no problems walking in the area where it occurred. However, I was surprised that the police treated what could have been a death so lightly.

I say this now because of the recent controversy about the very lenient sentence handed out to Kieran Loveridge, who killed Thomas Kelly with a king hit. Random acts of violence like this are terrifying. They are often perpetrated by individuals who submit themselves to the influence of drugs and alcohol.

One moment you are walking along without a care in the world. The next moment you suffer a massive hit from someone who is off their head, high on whatever substance they are abusing. I remember seeing this character coming towards me with a crazed look on his face. Why did he hit me? Presumably because he did not like the look of my face. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whatever sentence is passed on such individuals will not deter future crimes in this area. The individuals who commit them are not in control of themselves when they do it. They are out of control. But that does not mean they should be excused.

King hits can and do kill. Those who perpetrate them are a public menace and must be punished as severely as possible.

The new laws in NSW are to be applauded.

I feel for Kelly’s family. They have lost a loved son through a random act of violence. That act of violence is no less terrible because its perpetrator was not necessarily in control of himself. If victims and their families are to make sense of an event that seems to come out of nowhere it is important that both police and the law recognise that the rights of the victim are paramount.

Greg Melleuish is Associate Professor of history and politics at the University of Wollongong.

By IHMRI PhD Candidate Natalie Matosin

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Sound familiar?

It is common knowledge that the climate in which the 21st century scientist exists has greatly changed over the past decade, but completely revolutionized in the last half a century. From going to the library and borrowing an encyclopedia, we now not only have incredible volumes of information at our fingertips, but it has extended to a point where we get our information from absolutely anywhere, including blogs like this one. Global science is commonplace, and it is no longer an issue to be separated by oceans. Not only can we make international video calls, but also we can do it for free. Virtual conferences are becoming the new norm, and the physical distance between laboratories is increasingly irrelevant. Our information sources are more and more diverse whilst the sheer volume is increasing exponentially. This is applies on so many levels, from how we acquire and interpret our data in the lab, to the ways we keep in touch with the science that is going on in the rest of the world. Considering that data (and I mean information in the most general terms) is central to science, this is a topic that justifies some thought.

I’ve often wondered about whether it is more important to know a little about everything, or a lot about something very specific. Is it better to go to big conferences and learn about things that are quite broad and unrelated, that force us think critically and outside of the square? Or to go to small meetings where the attendants specialize on your topic? There is no doubt that sometimes ideas taken from other areas can be translated to our own precise topics, forcing us to think more critically about our own data or perhaps place it into a context that we had never considered before. This is certainly the idea in Europe where any science degree involves quite a bit of totally unrelated basic science. For example, my German neuroscientist friends were required to study botany and learn the Latin names of thousands of plant species – a bit of a jump to learning about molecular pathways in a subtype of neuron. On the other hand, my biomedical science degree from Australia was much more specialised, with a focus on anatomy and physiology. I could tell you all about how the body works at multiple systemic levels, but all plants just look green and leafy to me.

While it seems that our brains are like containers that can only hold so much, and learning new things tends to push old ones out, obviously this is not true. It always seemed like a good idea during my undergrad to take courses that were extremely related to the career I wanted to pursue. But as time has gone on, I wish I knew more about wider topics rather than living in a little biomedical bubble, and actually wish I were encouraged to study more basic maths, biology, chemistry and physics. While it is not essential for me to have memorized the laws of relativity, the principle of the observing reference frame (context context context) applies even to this post.

Having a wide knowledge base undoubtedly helps to develop critical thought and consider a notion in many different ways, because one has the capacity to do so. This sounds great when put in the context of scientific research, which is reliant on information interpretation. However focusing on the “big picture” can also drag our attention away from our goals and waste time pondering ideas that do not help us to arrive at any real endpoint. Some may argue that it’s about the journey, not the destination, but while we are fighting for positions and funding it does force us to be realistic and makes “free thinking” a type of luxury. This is especially true since we have such difficulty funding pure and basic science, and are often forced to put our ideas into a practical context where such knowledge would have some benefit for humankind.

It is easy to be consumed in information, completely snowed under and unable to find the surface again. In the current social climate, and particularly our inexhaustible hunger for information and product consumption, there is an unspoken notion that “more is better”. In terms of science, I don’t know if this is true. While exploratory thoughts can undoubtedly give us future direction or unearth monster ideas, we need to be careful not to become overly distracted. Like everything in science (and life) there is a grey area – there is no right or wrong about what we should or shouldn’t know. I think in a way it comes down to the type of people that we are, behind the scientist, and what we feel the most comfortable about. Personally, I get disillusioned knowing only a little bit about something, because I would prefer to have expert understanding. Others might find comfort in knowing a little about a lot as it gives the illusion of intelligence. I’ve come to the conclusion that there should be some element of “macro” science on our scope, but it is important to keep the “micro” science on the forefront of our brains so as not to become overly distracted with billions of side projects or thoughts that never really help to get to any endpoint. While it can be beneficial and self-satisfying to put the feelers out and engage with random intellectual thought, I’ve decided it’s more important to be the spider walking on the web, and not become the web itself.

Read more of Natalie’s musings about the life a HDR student on her blog ‘Brainstorm‘