HMC insights

The Australian government has a job to do: to decide not just how we deal with President Trump’s intended tariff regime, but what we do with the responses to those tariffs from major manufacturing territories such as India, China, ASEAN and the EU.

In the 75 years since HMC was founded, it is now Australia’s largest independent grease-maker. But the company is much more than grease.

It is interesting that as Australia goes into a phase of R&D-intensive spending on renewables, critical minerals, defence, quantum computing, biotech etc, that we are not discussing the role of R&D and its influence on productivity and national wealth.

The global uptake of technology is accelerating and the nations that control innovation can carve a path for themselves that won’t be available to other nations.

The question of whether Australia continues to be a country where we make things depends on a number of factors: the price of imports, the cost of labour and resources, the desire of Australians to buy locally-made goods and the quality and design of what we are making in this country. 

In manufacturing, everyone has access to pretty much the same equipment, similar materials, and finance structures. These do not change much from business to business. But employees can mean the difference in product quality, service, innovation, and agility.

It has become a business cliché that ‘our greatest asset is our people’, but if that is truly the case in Australian business, why do so many business leaders look askance when I tell them that I like to talk to our production team members?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a poorly understood technology. How else to explain the gulf between its fans who see AI improving how we do everything, and its detractors who see AI as dangerous and giving too much power to machines?