Queensland can be a manufacturing giant

This week the Guardian Australia published a great article about manufacturing and how Australia makes very little these days (see link below).

After the nightmare of coronavirus let's manufacture a better Australia

There can be no better time to press the policy buttons and move the levers in our economy towards the manufacturing sector.

We have a geographical location that allows Queensland to be a major supplier of manufactured goods and food into two-thirds of the world's population, India, Vietnam, South East Asia, and China.

For this to happen we have to completely turn our legislative, and regulatory model including approval timelines on their head. We are not globally competitive and we all know this!

We must have at the top of Queensland Treasury priorities, an economic and job focus that drives business approvals in line with our competitor's timeframes, encourages investment, and more importantly, generates state revenue, jobs and export income for Queensland.

Queensland has abundant energy, 300 days of sunshine, the greatest minds in the world, and a highly-skilled workforce just looking to get back to work. We have a fantastic port in Townsville with a short sailing time to Singapore and the Port of Brisbane.

We need to make things, sell things, export things and move our economy towards a point where it's not subject to the vagaries of natural disasters and pandemics as we can no longer rely on the tourism and hospitality sector to do the heavy lifting year in and year out.

Queensland's overseas Trade Commissioners should be armed with a globally competitive package of incentives to attract inbound investment in manufacturing. Queensland should also attack other states manufacturing base to grow our state economy as we are naive if we don't think they will come looking for businesses out of Queensland. Just look at Melbourne and Sydney salivating over being the Head Office for Virgin Australia MK11.

Queensland has enormous volumes of un-contracted natural gas, in fact the Bowen Basin has enough to supply Australia's domestic East Coast demand for 30 years.

So here is an idea.

Queensland subsidises the supply of natural gas for Queensland manufacturing for a 25 year period to grow our manufacturing base to globally competitive levels, provides low energy costs, attractive lease options in State Development areas with roads, power, water sewerage all ready and waiting and this has the potential to generate tens of thousands of new jobs in Regional Queensland. This is an investment in the diversification of Queensland's economy and once completed we will have a more robust and larger economy employing more Queenslanders. We could have the lowest business input costs in the nation offset against huge economic growth.

The degree of subsidies will depend on the number of jobs created, the volume of natural gas used, the regional locations, and importantly the economic uplift to our State Gross Product and the tax contributions.

The USA used cheap gas to reopen manufacturing industries, so what cant we?

Cheap Natural Gas Pumping New Life Into U.S. Factories