Well this is not an easy topic, but here some of the things which I find worth contemplating about
:
- I often read about Australia being "World Class" in particular areas of industry but the world leaders do rarely share that view.
- We have fees for higher education but Scandinavian countries central European countries such as Germany (after a short time with fees) have free higher education and at least in the traditional engineering disciplines outperform us. They learned that payments are associated with an expectation to pass and that money does not equal talent.
- Our trade education system does not produce the same average level of competencies other leading countries do.
- In modern manufacturing methods like LEAN and TPM the majority of our businesses are behind world best practice.
- We have some high performing manufacturers and innovators such as Cochlear but that are our top 5%.
And most important, our remote location and small domestic market makes large scale manufacturing just not viable, not with the current wages.