We Can Build More Than We Think
What the database reveals about Australian manufacturing capability, and why we should use it.
There's a common assumption in Australia that we don't make things anymore. That the ships have sailed, the factories have closed, and our role in the global economy is to dig things up and send them overseas.
The data tells a different story.
We built a database. We asked a simple question: What can Australia build? The answer surprised us.
Across 80+ products and 15 categories, we found Australian companies manufacturing things most people don't know about. Incat in Hobart built the world's largest battery-electric ship. CSL in Melbourne operates the largest plasma fractionation facility in the Southern Hemisphere, turning donated blood into life-saving therapies. Orica, headquartered in Melbourne, supplies mining explosives to operations in over 100 countries.
But it goes deeper. Australia produces the world's only commercially available Q fever vaccine, made by CSL Seqirus in Parkville. We manufacture bionic eyes at Bionic Vision Technologies. Tasmanian Alkaloids grows and processes roughly half the world's legal opiate supply for pharmaceutical use. Hypersonix in Brisbane is developing scramjet engines for hypersonic flight. The Sydney Quantum Academy and its partners are building actual quantum computing hardware.
Every Boeing 787 Dreamliner flying today contains components manufactured in Melbourne under a $5 billion contract. It's Boeing's largest aerospace deal outside the United States. Austal in Henderson, Western Australia exports high-speed aluminium ferries and naval vessels to customers on every continent.
These are companies operating today, employing Australians, building things the world needs.
The database reveals something important: Australian manufacturing capability is broader and deeper than the national conversation suggests. We have world-leading positions in aluminium shipbuilding, biotechnology, mining technology, space launch systems, and aerospace components.
We can build. The question is why we don't build more.
The Gaps Are a Choice
For every product Australia builds, the database shows others we don't. We mine 47% of the world's lithium but manufacture almost none of it into battery cells. We produce iron ore at scale but import finished steel products. We design world-class Wi-Fi chips at Morse Micro but have no semiconductor fabrication facility to manufacture them.
We can build antivenoms for the world's most dangerous snakes and spiders, because we have to. But we can't build a television, a refrigerator, or a mobile phone.
These gaps aren't accidents of geography or economics. They're the accumulated result of decisions, and non-decisions, made over decades.
When Holden closed in 2017, it wasn't inevitable. When our last oil refinery shuttered, it wasn't physics. When Energy Renaissance collapsed in 2025, taking Australia's best shot at domestic battery cell manufacturing with it, the market didn't fail. Our systems did.
The pattern is consistent: Australia excels at the front end (research, design, raw materials) and the back end (assembly, integration, services), but hollows out the middle. We dig up the ore and ship it overseas. Someone else turns it into components. We import those components and bolt them together.
That's not a supply chain. That's a vulnerability.
Why Don't We Build?
Three forces conspire against Australian manufacturing, and none of them are immutable laws of economics.
First, political time horizons.
Building manufacturing capability takes a decade. Political terms last three years. The incentives don't align. A politician who funds a semiconductor fab today won't be in office when it produces its first chip. The ribbon-cutting will belong to someone else. So the funding doesn't come, or it comes in fragments too small to matter, or it comes with conditions that make projects unbankable.
Meanwhile, approving a new mine is faster, the royalties flow sooner, and the photo opportunities are immediate. Politicians think in terms; builders think in generations. Our system rewards the former.
Second, the comfort of incumbency.
Australia's economy has been buoyed by resources and real estate for so long that we've forgotten what it feels like to compete on capability. When iron ore prices are high, there's no urgency to diversify. When house prices keep rising, capital flows into property instead of productive enterprise.
It's rational behaviour in a system that rewards passive assets over active building. Why take the risk of manufacturing when you can clip tickets on existing resource flows? Ticket-clipping doesn't create new value, doesn't employ engineers, and doesn't build industries that last. But the incentives point the other way.
Third, a cultural failure of imagination.
Somewhere along the way, Australians started believing that we couldn't compete in advanced manufacturing. That it was too hard, too expensive, too late. That our role was to supply raw materials to countries that actually make things.
This is a story we tell ourselves, and it's wrong. The database proves it. We already build rockets, vaccines, warships, scramjets, and quantum computers. The question is whether we'll choose to build more.
What Building More Would Mean
Imagine an Australia that processed its own lithium into battery-grade chemicals and manufactured those into cells. That fabricated semiconductors instead of importing them. That built electric vehicles, not just the minerals that go into them.
South Korea did it in a generation. Taiwan did it. Ireland did it. Countries with fewer natural advantages than Australia decided to build, and then built the institutions and incentives to make it happen.
The benefits compound. Manufacturers need suppliers, which creates more manufacturers. Engineers train more engineers. Capabilities cluster, and clusters attract investment. One battery cell plant creates demand for a dozen component suppliers. One semiconductor fab anchors an entire electronics ecosystem.
The alternative is continued dependence on commodity cycles we don't control, on supply chains we don't own, on strategic capabilities we've outsourced to others. The pandemic showed us what happens when those chains break. The next disruption won't be more forgiving.
A Call to Build
The database is an inventory of what we have, and what we're missing.
We have raw materials in abundance. We have energy that could be the cheapest in the world if we chose to develop it. We have universities producing world-class researchers. We have companies that already compete globally in advanced manufacturing.
What we lack is the collective will to connect these pieces. To fund manufacturing at the scale it requires. To accept that some investments won't pay off within an electoral cycle. To redirect capital from passive assets into productive enterprise.
The tools are in our hands. The resources are beneath our feet. The capability exists, scattered across factories and labs and shipyards from Henderson to Hobart to Broadmeadows.
What remains is the choice.
We can keep digging things up and shipping them out, hoping the terms of trade stay favourable. Or we can decide that Australia builds things. Not as a slogan, but as a strategy.
The database shows what's possible. The rest is up to us.
It's time to build.
Explore the Database
See for yourself what Australia can build, and what we're missing.