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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-07-24 Daily Xml
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Manufacturing Technologies Program

Mr GEE (Napier) (15:20): My question is to the Minister for Manufacturing and Innovation. Can the minister inform the house about state government assistance to link local manufacturers with emerging technologies?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Manufacturing and Innovation, Minister for Automotive Transformation, Minister for the Public Sector) (15:21): I thank the member for his question. This morning I launched the Manufacturing Technologies Program. The Manufacturing Technologies Program aims to raise local industry's awareness and understanding of the availability and capabilities of new technologies being developed locally by our researchers.

Competing on innovation and value over cost and scale is the way forward for South Australian manufacturing. We want to expand the government's support for enterprises seeking to adopt new technologies in their pursuit of lower costs and more advanced manufacturing methods. This program not only maps the capabilities of universities and research providers but also investigates what may be useful for local manufacturers looking to take up new technologies.

There are multiple pathways to innovation. The Manufacturing Technologies Program will play an important role in helping South Australian firms choose the right pathway for them. There is significant untapped potential for firms to collaborate and for the government and public research sector to leverage our state's world-class applied research. In a two-stage process, the capabilities of the state's research providers and universities have been mapped to find what expertise and equipment is available to local manufacturers.

The next stage comprises a comprehensive industry survey to determine the level of industry knowledge around new technologies, which technologies are currently being implemented and how government can better assist local firms to use them. The technology areas to be explored include additive manufacturing, advanced materials, advanced robotics and automation, photonics, digital technology and big data analytics.

I can inform the house that this morning I attended a breakfast hosted by the Department of State Development with a number of manufacturing firms as well as researchers from universities, including, of course, the incredibly impressive Professor Tanya Monro who runs IPAS out of the University of Adelaide. It was an education simply to be at that breakfast. For an hour and a half we were informed of the full scale of existing technology and technology that is just starting to come into being and is available for our manufacturing companies to avail themselves of right now.

It's fantastic for us to have research and it's fantastic for us to have manufacturing companies. What we need is for the companies to know what kind of research is happening and for the researchers to understand what kind of possibilities there are for solving problems, real world problems, problems that, if solved, will cause an enormous amount of economic activity and, therefore, benefit all of us.

The Manufacturing Technologies Program complements government-backed initiatives being run in partnership with Flinders University and Adelaide University to promote the uptake of medical device technologies, nanotechnology and photonics. I believe I informed the house previously about the work that was done with S.J. Cheesman in Port Pirie.

It has been a beneficiary of one of our grants to work with IPAS, the Photonics Institute at the University of Adelaide, where they have been able to create sensors that are able to measure up to 1,000 degrees, which has not been possible before, which means that molten metal is able to be measured at an incredibly accurate temperature, which of course is extremely useful in the smelting industry.

This government strongly believes that the future for South Australia is as a state that makes things. Manufacturing in this state is not on its deathbed. Indeed, in the 12 months to May 2014, an extra 8,000 people were employed across the state in the manufacturing sector. That takes the percentage of those employed in manufacturing to just under 10 per cent—

The SPEAKER: The minister's time has expired. The member for Heysen.

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