Stuck in low gear over hi-tech jobs
TWO unusual things caught my interest recently and got me thinking why the massive momentum of public interest that was behind Geelong’s 21st century smart city seems to have stalled.
The first was about a bloke they call the British mad genius, Sir James Dyson. He’s a kind of engineering superhero with a reputation for rescuing languishing markets with brilliant inventions.
Dyson’s been working with batteries, fluid dynamics, electric motors and the likes. Right now, he’s putting together a new electric car from solid-state batteries rather than lithium-ion jobs. He’s got a massive $2 billion project going and he’s tipped to be the next big thing in cars and maybe he will be.
I love cars, especially top-line engineered cars. The V12 growl of 500-plus Lamborghini or Ferrari horses under your backside is magnificent. And scary. It’s all almost primeval, like some massive force of nature.
I watch what unfolds in the car-making world with great interest. And in Geelong’s case, with great sadness. The departure of Ford from North Geelong after all those years was just tragic. The closures of Toyota, Holden and everybody else in Australia’s auto-making industry is just awful.
But Dyson’s cars are fascinating. And for the life of me I can’t figure why we aren’t driving so much harder — with business incentives, tax concessions and whatever it takes — to get some cutting-edge techno manufacturers into Geelong. Into the old Ford factory, the old Alcoa plant.
Silicon Valley we are not — as much as a lot of our supposedly economic development leaders and lobbyists would like to think.
Sure, we have the Geelong Innovation Precinct at Waurn Ponds pushing innovative techno start-ups to prototype stage and maybe early production. This precinct gets industry close to Deakin Uni’s Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training, the Carbon Nexus research centre, the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and CSIRO Manufacturing.
And it’s all very good. It had a bit of money poured into it and I don’t want to take a thing away from it. It’s helped 40-odd businesses including Barwon Health, Carbon Revolution, Quickstep, Cytomatrix, HeiQ Australia, Smith Electric Australia, Kemin Australia, Conflux Technologies and 36T.
But, again, Silicon Valley it’s not. A chickenfeed $50 million here and there isn’t going to do the job we need. Dyson’s pouring $2 billion into his new car. We need our cutting-edge innovations to be pushed much harder.
They’re the real wealth-generators of the future, not government-operated insurance offices. Geelong’s economy still needs to make things, and develop hi-tech services that generate wealth.
It’s handy to have your TACs and WorkCovers and NDIS and Commcares. But they’re taxpayer-financed, and we need to develop up industries that generate wealth and provide new tax revenue. We can’t rely on iron ore forever, we can’t rely on coal or gas or uranium exports forever.
So where is the cash we need for new tech? I’ll tell you where $1.5 billion is — Daniel Andrews is paying it for a road he refuses to build. Pure genius. Taking political innovation to a new level altogether.
Which gets me to the second thing I mentioned at the outset. It concerns the collapse of American TV’s mega-sweetheart Oprah Winfrey. When it comes to magnificent failures she’s raised the bar to a new level of stupid.
And Mr Andrews should take note. Oprah ignored her fans and what they expected of her back in 2008 when she decided to enter politics and back Barack Obama for Democratic presidential candidate ahead of Hillary Clinton.
She went for a black man over a white woman, and let everyone know. Thing is, with her audience predominantly women, her ratings plummeted.
Oprah jumped from TV before she was embarrassingly pushed.
I’m thinking about Geelong’s future. Right now, it’s being held back by all kinds of political selfinterest and government stupidity, courtesy of Mr Andrews.
What he’s doing is what Oprah did. He’s ignoring what his supporters expected of him. He’s ignoring the fact he’s failed to deliver all kinds of enthusiasm, superb governance and confidence Geelong was supposedly lacking when he kicked out the council.
He’s ignoring valuable economic opportunities that we won’t get again. He’s ignoring the fact new industries that should be soaring are just puddling away, clever but slow and poised to be overtaken by sharper, more business-orientated competitors.
It’s not going to end happily for him, same as Oprah. But that’s his own fault.
The real tragedy will be if our innovators — the innovators who could be injecting a few hundred horsepower into the Geelong economy — are left by the side of the road as their competition races past them.