Make It in New South Wales

New South Wales was once the manufacturing heart of Australia: steel in the Illawarra, aluminium and heavy engineering in the Hunter, food processing in country towns, and everything from rolling stock to pharmaceuticals in Sydney's suburbs. That is not sentiment. In November 1984 manufacturing employed 391,600 people in New South Wales — 17.2 per cent of everyone with a job in this state — and the sector peaked at 404,900 in February 1988 (derived from ABS, 2026a).

What happened next is usually told as a collapse, and the first part of it was. Headcount fell about 39 per cent from that 1988 peak. But the second part is more interesting, and it changes what policy should be trying to do. Across 2005 manufacturing employed an average of 270,200 people in New South Wales, 8.8 per cent of state employment; across 2015, 250,400, or 6.9 per cent; and in February 2026, 247,100, or 5.4 per cent — 247,200 and 5.5 per cent averaged over the four quarters to February 2026 (derived from ABS, 2026a). Manufacturing employment in this state has been broadly flat at about a quarter of a million people for two decades. What collapsed over those twenty years was not the headcount. It was the share: total New South Wales employment grew from about 3.08 million to about 4.54 million across the same period. The sector did not keep shrinking. The rest of the economy grew around it.

Two honesty notes belong with those numbers. They are our own aggregation of the ABS group-level data cube — summing every ANZSIC Division C manufacturing group for New South Wales, full-time and part-time — rather than a headline figure the ABS publishes; and they are original, not seasonally adjusted, survey estimates subject to sampling error, so a movement of a few thousand between quarters means nothing (ABS, 2026a). We would rather show the working than round it into a slogan.

The value is growing; the headcount is not

The national picture is consistent with that reading. In 2024-25 Australian manufacturing employed 901,000 people at the end of June, up by just 2,000 people or 0.2 per cent on the year before, while manufacturing industry value added rose by $6,249 million to $141,973 million — growth of 4.6 per cent — and sales and service income rose 6.9 per cent (ABS, 2026b). Those employment and value-added figures are national, not New South Wales. What the same collection says about this state is narrower but real: New South Wales recorded the largest growth in sales and service income of any state, 4.8 per cent to $74.9 billion across all industries, with manufacturing the single largest contributor at 9.5 per cent or $14.5 billion, and New South Wales also had the largest increase in wages and salaries, 5.7 per cent to $16.1 billion (ABS, 2026b). That is a growth figure across all industries with manufacturing identified as the biggest driver — it is not a New South Wales manufacturing value-added number and should not be quoted as one. Nor can it be spliced onto the headcount series above: Australian Industry is a business survey whose employment basis differs from the Labour Force Survey, and mixing the two in one sentence produces a statistic that is not true in either.

Put plainly: manufacturing in this country is becoming more valuable without becoming larger in people. A platform that promises to bring back the employment levels of 1988 is promising something no advanced economy has delivered. A platform that aims to capture more of the value, and to hold and grow the quarter of a million skilled jobs New South Wales still has, is achievable — and it is what this document argues for.

The rolling stock argument, made carefully

Trains and ferries have been ordered from overseas — with well-publicised defects and delays — while local firms with the capability to build and maintain them watched from the sidelines. That grievance is genuine and it is widely felt. It is also the place where this debate most often goes wrong, because the single most-quoted document about the New Intercity Fleet says something different from what it is usually said to say. We deal with it properly in section 4, and we deal with it against ourselves as much as for ourselves.

We are not pretending the 1970s are coming back. Modern manufacturing is advanced, clean, export-oriented and tightly connected to research — and it is exactly the kind of secure, well-paid work this state should be competing for. The Australian Democrats want New South Wales to make things again: not through nostalgia, but through patient, practical policy that survives changes of government.

New South Wales already has two of the country's most promising innovation precincts. Tech Central, around Central Station in Sydney, clusters start-ups, scale-ups and university research in one of the best-connected locations in Australia. The Western Sydney Aerotropolis, around the new Western Sydney International Airport, is planned as a hub for advanced manufacturing, freight, agribusiness and aerospace.

It is worth noticing which of those two we can write about with evidence. The Aerotropolis has been examined by a parliamentary committee that took submissions, held hearings and published findings, so there is a public record to argue with. Tech Central has had no comparable public examination, which means the only available account of how it is performing is the account produced by the people running it. That asymmetry is itself an argument for the governance reforms below.

The Aerotropolis is running at two speeds, and a committee has said so

A New South Wales upper house committee that examined the Western Sydney developments found precisely the pattern that ought to worry anyone who has watched a precinct announcement. Its chair recorded that the evidence "painted a picture of the broader Western Sydney developments as being very much a two-speed affair: while the new Western Sydney International Airport is progressing at pace, on track to open in 2026, much of the surrounding development in the Aerotropolis precincts appeared to the committee to have not kept pace" — with "the much-vaunted promises of jobs, infrastructure and new transport connections" still, for parts of Western Sydney, "an unrealised mirage" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). The committee made 18 recommendations. Two of them go directly to whether a manufacturer could commit: recommendation 7 asks government to "ensure that water infrastructure development is expedited in the Aerotropolis, to minimise further delays and allow for land development to be unlocked", and recommendation 9 that government "ensure that the eventual industry mix of the Aerotropolis aligns closely to the NSW Industry Policy, with a diversity of job opportunities for local communities" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025).

This is a parliamentary committee reporting on the evidence before it, not an audit, and it should be read that way. But it is evidence from people under oath, and it says that the aviation infrastructure is arriving on schedule while the industrial land that was supposed to justify it is not.

What is actually at Bradfield, stated accurately

The advanced manufacturing story at Bradfield is real, and it is thinner than the press coverage suggests. The Bradfield Development Authority told the committee it had "entered into 38 memorandums of understanding with industry partners", including with the Australian Space Agency, BAE Systems, Coles Group Limited, Droneshield Limited and Hitachi Australia — and, importantly, the Authority itself "stated that not all of the Memoranda of Understanding contemplate investment or location within the Bradfield City Centre area" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). Thirty-eight memoranda of understanding are not thirty-eight factories, and the Authority is to its credit the source of that caution rather than the target of it.

The physical capability is more concrete than the paperwork. The Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Facility, wholly owned by the Authority and described in evidence as "designed to be a shared services, industry and innovation accelerator for the region", offers additive manufacturing, advanced composites, engineering design, factory digitisation, manufacturing automation, metrology and inspection, precision machining and quality assurance (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). That is a genuine shared asset of the kind small manufacturers cannot buy alone, and it is the sort of thing public money should be doing.

The job numbers attached to the precinct are master-plan aspirations at full build-out, not employment that exists. The Authority's chief executive Ken Morrison told the committee the Bradfield master plan aims at 20,000 jobs and that defence and aerospace is "one of those" focuses within an overall advanced manufacturing focus; the Badgerys Creek precinct is planned for advanced manufacturing and industry uses with "the opportunity for between 9,000 to 11,000 jobs" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). Anyone quoting those figures should say what they are. We also note, because it belongs in an honest account, that the committee recorded community sentiment concerns about weapons manufacturing in the precinct. A defence and space cluster is a legitimate industrial strategy and a contested one, and the people who live next to it are entitled to be part of deciding it.

Enabling works are where precincts quietly fail

The best-documented enabling-works failure in recent New South Wales history is not at a precinct at all — it is at a railway. The Auditor-General found that the capital cost of enabling works for the New Intercity Fleet had grown 55 per cent, to $1.1 billion, by the time the rolling-stock contract itself was awarded in September 2016 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2025). Enabling works are the unglamorous part: the power, the water, the sidings, the roads, the connections. They are also the part that decides whether a private investor can sign.

The risk with precincts is that they remain glossy announcements while the basics lag. We would hold both to account with simple mechanisms:

• Transparent precinct governance — boards that include industry, researchers and local councils, with published performance reporting on jobs created, floor space actually occupied and private investment landed, not just committed. A memorandum of understanding is a lead, not an outcome, and it should be reported as one.
• Sequenced enabling works — utilities, transport and zoned industrial land at the Aerotropolis delivered ahead of demand, so manufacturers can commit with confidence rather than waiting on promises. The committee's own recommendation 7 on expediting water infrastructure is the immediate test of whether that is happening (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025).
• Room for makers, not just desks — protecting affordable industrial and maker space near both precincts, because a precinct that prices out prototyping and light manufacturing becomes just another office park.
• Shared capability, published terms — facilities like the Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Facility should publish their access terms, pricing and utilisation, so a twelve-person firm in Penrith knows what it can book and what it costs (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025).

No factory runs without people, and New South Wales is short of them — from fitters and electricians to mechatronics technicians. TAFE NSW is the backbone of that pipeline, but decades of stop-start funding have hollowed out courses, campuses and teaching staff.

The scale of TAFE, and its honest weak point

TAFE NSW is not a marginal provider. In 2024-25 it recorded 364,800 total enrolments across 154 metropolitan, regional and remote locations, including 92,100 short-course enrolments, 91,500 through TAFE Digital, 37,300 domestic commercial, 4,359 international and 2,800 in higher education, with more than 66 per cent of enrolments delivered under the Smart and Skilled and Targeted Priority programs (TAFE NSW, 2025). On the apprenticeship pipeline specifically, in 2024 TAFE NSW recorded 22,800 apprenticeship approvals, "accounting for 75 per cent of all apprentice approvals in the state" (TAFE NSW, 2025). Three in four of the apprentices this state will rely on to build, wire, weld and maintain everything in this platform pass through one institution.

The weak point is what happens after enrolment. Based on students who commenced in 2019, the TAFE NSW completion rate is 48 per cent for all students undertaking Australian Qualifications Framework courses; there were over 157,100 completions in 2024, including more than 28,900 at Certificate IV level or above (TAFE NSW, 2025). We are not going to present 48 per cent as a simple failure rate, because it is not one. TAFE NSW notes that completion rates are affected by course duration, by students taking longer than the nominal period, by delays in signing off workplace training, and by course transfers, and it uses a broader set of success measures than completion alone (TAFE NSW, 2025). But a figure like that, published by the institution itself, is exactly the number a serious skills policy should be organised around — not because it condemns anyone, but because moving it is worth more to a manufacturer than another round of commencement announcements.

The national pipeline is thinning even as trade completions improve

The national picture, which is not the same as the New South Wales picture and should not be quoted as if it were, contains both halves of the problem. Nationally, of apprentices who commenced in 2018, 58.2 per cent completed within six years — up 0.7 percentage points — and construction trades workers recorded the largest improvement, up 1.7 percentage points to a six-year completion rate of 57.7 per cent (NCVER, 2025). Completions for construction trades workers in the twelve months to June 2025 reached 15,500, 21.1 per cent higher than a year earlier, with carpenters and joiners up 34.6 per cent, electricians up 31.7 per cent and motor mechanics up 24.2 per cent (NCVER, 2025). Against that, total apprenticeship contracts in training nationally fell 11.3 per cent compared with 30 June 2024 — trade contracts down 7.3 per cent and non-trade contracts down 20.2 per cent (NCVER, 2025). Completion is improving. The stock of people in training is falling faster. Those figures are published by the National Centre for Vocational Education and Research, not the ABS, and the distinction matters when the numbers are argued about.

Funding certainty: extending a reform, not inventing one

We would give TAFE funding certainty: multi-year budgets set in advance so institutes can plan courses, keep specialist teachers and maintain workshops, instead of lurching from one budget cycle to the next. Honesty requires us to say that most of this argument has already been won. In February 2025 the New South Wales Government announced it would undertake reforms within twelve months to remove TAFE NSW from the Smart and Skilled competitive market — a key recommendation of the NSW VET Review Interim Report published in December 2023 — and removal from the contestable funding market means TAFE NSW "will no longer compete with private training providers for funding and instead will have a more predictable annual budget" (TAFE NSW, 2025). We support that decision. What we would add is duration and enforceability: an annual budget that is more predictable than a contestable market is an improvement on a bad baseline, and it is not the same as a published multi-year funding envelope an institute can hire a specialist welding teacher against in 2029.

We support targeted fee-free places in genuine skills-shortage trades, stronger apprenticeship completion support (completion rates, not just commencements, are the honest measure), and courses co-designed with the employers in each region — clean energy trades in the Hunter, aerospace and logistics in Western Sydney, food manufacturing on the North Coast and Riverina. Regional TAFE campuses should be treated as economic anchors for their towns, not cost centres to be trimmed. Where a Renewable Energy Zone or a precinct is being built, the training capacity should be committed on the same timetable as the substation, not two years after the construction workforce has arrived and left.

NSW universities and research institutes produce world-class work that is too often commercialised — and manufactured — offshore. We would back proof-of-concept and scale-up support so NSW research becomes NSW products, and use government as a demanding first customer for locally developed technology.

The word to hold onto there is demanding. A first customer that will accept anything teaches a young firm nothing and buys the public something worse than it could have had. A first customer that specifies clearly, tests properly, pays on time and then reorders is the most valuable thing a state can offer a manufacturer, and New South Wales has two of them sitting in plain sight. Transport for NSW has described the Tangara replacement as the first in a pipeline of locally built trains "that extends out to the 2050s" (Transport for NSW, 2025) — a repeat order over decades is precisely the demand signal that justifies a firm building a plant and training a workforce. And the Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Facility at Bradfield already offers additive manufacturing, advanced composites, factory digitisation, automation, metrology, precision machining and quality assurance as shared services (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025), which is the equipment a research team needs to get from a working prototype to something a procurement officer will sign for. Connecting the two — shared prototyping capability at one end, a published multi-decade order book at the other — is cheaper than a commercialisation fund and harder to waste.

The biggest opportunity is clean industry: batteries and storage, recycling and resource recovery, building electrification, and low-emissions metals and materials — fields where the Hunter and Illawarra's industrial workforce, ports and grid connections are genuine advantages as the energy transition accelerates.

The scale of the transition, and the honest shape of its jobs

EnergyCo reports that the New South Wales Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap is expected to drive up to $77 billion in private investment, with EnergyCo projects "set to create up to 7,000 jobs during construction and almost 4,500 ongoing jobs" (EnergyCo, 2025). Those are forecasts published in an agency's own annual report, not realised outcomes, and the asymmetry in them is the point: 7,000 construction jobs against roughly 4,500 ongoing across an entire multi-decade program is a large infrastructure build, not a manufacturing revival. The manufacturing opportunity in the energy transition is not in the ongoing operation of wind farms. It is in what gets built to supply them.

The pipeline itself is moving. The Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone is "the most advanced of our REZs and is the first major greenfield REZ in Australia"; during 2024-25 it reached financial close, ACEREZ began construction as network operator, and ten new wind, solar and battery projects totalling 7.15 gigawatts were approved through the network access scheme, with over $60 million in Community and Employment Benefit Program grants announced on 11 April 2025 (EnergyCo, 2025). The Illawarra REZ, with an intended network capacity of one gigawatt, is "set to become the state's first 'urban' REZ", with "strong potential for investment in new green hydrogen and steel industries, leveraging its existing workforce, robust supply chain and established manufacturing plant" (EnergyCo, 2025). That last description is the clearest statement any New South Wales agency has made of why the Illawarra matters industrially rather than just electrically.

A quarter of a billion dollars to move components we do not make

The clearest illustration of the gap in this state's industrial capability is a road program. EnergyCo and Transport for NSW are delivering the Port to REZ Program to move oversize and overmass equipment "such as wind turbines, from the Port of Newcastle to REZs" (EnergyCo, 2025). Stage 1 covers upgrades at 19 locations between the Port of Newcastle and Elong Elong in the Central-West Orana REZ, jointly funded by the New South Wales and Commonwealth governments at $128.5 million, with construction starting in April 2025 and completion expected mid-2026. Stage 2 targets the New England REZ, with fieldwork around Tamworth from April 2025 and route planning through 2025 and 2026 focused on Muswellbrook, Uralla, Walcha and Armidale. In June 2025 the Government announced a $115.5 million investment in a Newcastle Logistics Precinct next to the Port of Newcastle, on the former BHP Intertrade site, to "expand portside storage" for oversize and overmass equipment (EnergyCo, 2025).

We are careful about what that proves. EnergyCo's report describes logistics for equipment arriving through a port and portside storage for it; it does not state an import share for turbines, and we do not assert one. What it does show, unambiguously, is that New South Wales is spending roughly a quarter of a billion dollars widening roads and building storage so that very large energy components can be brought inland from a wharf. That is money spent well — the components have to move — and it is also a map of where the manufacturing value is currently landing. A state building portside storage for turbine components on the site of the old BHP Intertrade works should at least ask itself what it could be making there instead of storing.

Critical minerals: a deferral, not a subsidy

New South Wales released its Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy 2024-35 on 18 October 2024, with a $250 million royalty deferral scheme as its centrepiece, live from 1 July 2025 (NSW Resources, 2024). Under the scheme, royalties may be deferred for five years from the date of first production; projects must commence production between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2030; it applies exclusively to minerals on the Commonwealth Government's Critical Minerals List; projects must predominantly extract critical minerals; and applicants must have a market capitalisation of less than $5 billion. Quarterly returns are still required but payment is deferred, with repayment indexed to government borrowing rates at the time of deferral, and it is an opt-in program requiring application (NSW Resources, 2024).

We describe it precisely because precision is the whole point of the discipline we set out in the Key Directions below. This is a deferral of a payment, not a grant and not a subsidy — the money is still owed, with indexation. It supports extraction and, indirectly, midstream processing. It does not itself fund downstream manufacturing, and it should not be counted as though it does. Figures circulating in secondary coverage about the capital investment and job numbers the scheme will unlock do not appear in the primary release, so we do not use them.

Room for the small and the regional

Alongside the big plays, we want small-scale regional manufacturing — food and beverage, timber products, agricultural equipment — to have a fair go, which mostly means getting out of its way. These are the firms least able to absorb an approvals process designed for a project ten times their size, and the ones most likely to keep a regional town's payroll in the town.

We should say that this idea is not ours alone. The upper house committee on the Western Sydney developments recommended "adopting a centralised government contact for the planning associated within local government areas" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). Where a committee of the Parliament has already recommended something we support, the useful contribution is not to re-announce it — it is to ask whether it has been implemented, and to attach a published clock to it if it has.

Everything in this platform costs money or costs somebody time, and a party that claims to keep the bastards honest should be honest about both. Precincts, procurement preferences and training programs only pay for themselves if the settings underneath them — the cost of energy, the cost of compliance, and the time it takes to get an answer out of government — are competitive to begin with.

On energy, check the price before repeating the slogan

The standard framing is that energy costs are killing Australian manufacturing. On the most recent wholesale market data, that framing needs qualifying. In the June quarter of 2026, New South Wales wholesale electricity spot prices averaged $75 per megawatt hour, down 53 per cent year on year; the National Electricity Market average was $74 per megawatt hour, down $66 or 47 per cent from the same quarter in 2025 and the lowest second-quarter average since 2020 (AEMO, 2026a). Victoria recorded $56, Queensland $67, and Tasmania and South Australia $86 each. In the March quarter of 2026 New South Wales had averaged $73, down 16 per cent year on year (AEMO, 2026b). AEMO attributes the fall to increased renewable generation, higher grid-scale battery discharge during peak periods and reduced evening peak demand, noting that 4,445 megawatts and 11,219 megawatt hours of new large-scale battery capacity were added to the National Electricity Market in the year to the March quarter of 2026 — more than doubling installed battery capacity — with battery charge and discharge setting prices in 32 per cent of intervals (AEMO, 2026b).

Gas has moved the same way. East coast wholesale gas prices averaged $9.08 per gigajoule across AEMO markets in the June quarter of 2026, the lowest average for any quarter since the June quarter of 2021, against $12.36 a year earlier. The Sydney Short Term Trading Market hub specifically averaged $9.21 per gigajoule, down 27 per cent from $12.59 in the June quarter of 2025 and down from $10.65 in the March quarter of 2026, with AEMO noting that international LNG spot prices were materially higher than east coast prices over the same period. Gas-fired generation demand hit its lowest second-quarter level since 2003 (AEMO, 2026a).

Three caveats have to travel with those numbers or they will be misused. Wholesale spot price is only one component of what a factory actually pays: network charges, environmental scheme costs and retail margin sit on top, and most large industrial users buy on contracts rather than at spot, so a good quarter in the spot market does not appear on a manufacturer's bill that quarter or possibly at all. Gas feedstock and process-heat costs matter far more to some subsectors — bricks, glass, chemicals, food processing — than to others. And a quarter is not a trend. What the data does support is a narrower and more useful claim: the input-cost argument against building things in New South Wales is weaker in 2026 than it was in 2022, and anyone still making it should be asked to show current numbers.

On compliance, the national numbers are not small

The Productivity Commission put Commonwealth budgetary assistance to trade and industry at $16.1 billion in 2023-24, up 3.9 per cent on the year before, with tax concessions supplying 52.3 per cent of the total and direct outlays the remaining 47.7 per cent; manufacturers were among the three groups that did best out of it relative to their share of the economy (Productivity Commission, 2025a). The compliance side is harder to see but no smaller. Australia slipped from fifth to fourteenth on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business index between 2005 and 2020, and from third to sixteenth on the OECD's Product Market Regulation index between 2003 and 2023 (Productivity Commission, 2025b). Closer to home, NSW Treasury analysis reported in the state's own productivity White Paper put the cost to New South Wales of weaknesses in the regulatory impact analysis process alone at around $500 million a year — administrative costs, substantive compliance costs, fees and charges, and the cost of delay (NSW Productivity Commission, 2021).

None of that is an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for doing the cheap things first, and for being able to show your work.

1. Test every dollar of industry support against the cheaper alternative

Adopt a standing rule that support aimed at a named firm or a named sector is the second-best instrument — used only where a published business case shows it beats the broad-based alternatives of cheaper energy, faster approvals, better-trained workers and sounder tax design, and only with a sunset date, a published evaluation and an exit strategy written in from the start. The Productivity Commission's caution is worth stating plainly: poorly designed industry policy "can be costly for governments, act as a form of trade protection and distort the allocation of Australia's resources towards activities that Australia is not best placed to undertake", even as it accepts that well-designed industry policy can address genuine market failures such as unpriced carbon and innovation spillovers (Productivity Commission, 2025a). Its worked example is sobering: after AdBlue shortages prompted government investment in a domestic manufacturing plant, the plant closed anyway, because the imported urea and gas feedstock it depended on were themselves disrupted (Productivity Commission, 2025a). This has to be weighed honestly against the local-content preferences in section 4 and the clean-industry backing in section 5 — it is in real tension with both. Our answer is that those commitments survive the test precisely because they are conditional: local content that must still stack up on whole-of-life value, and clean-industry support that must still be justified against the alternatives and judged on published results. A subsidy nobody is willing to end is not industry policy; it is a habit.

2. Count the cost of compliance the way we count the cost of concrete

Set a dollar target for cutting what state regulation costs New South Wales businesses in compliance and delay, require any new regulatory cost to be offset elsewhere, and commission an independent annual review that reports whether the burden is actually falling. That is the approach the Productivity Commission recommended nationally in December 2025: a target to cut Commonwealth compliance and delay costs by $10 billion by 2030, an annual Regulation Review reporting on a broader set of indicators of regulatory quality and burden, regulators and portfolios operating under what it calls "regulatory burden offsetting" so that they do not increase net compliance and delay costs, and an independent statutory commissioner to raise the standards for impact analyses (Productivity Commission, 2025b). It is worth being just as clear about what the Commission did not ask for. It weighed repeating a full baseline costing of the regulatory stock and concluded that this would be costly and time-consuming for agencies and would probably yield limited benefits, preferring the simpler discipline of a dollar target (Productivity Commission, 2025b). New South Wales should copy the method and resist the temptation to spend three years measuring before it starts. Pair it with published, enforceable decision timeframes for the approvals a manufacturer actually needs — development consent, environment protection licensing, grid connection — so the single front door proposed in section 5 comes with a clock attached. New South Wales has a measurable problem to fix: on the evidence assembled for the state's 2021 productivity White Paper, development application determinations for medium-density housing by high-activity councils averaged 200 days in New South Wales against 70 to 105 days in other jurisdictions, and greenfield subdivision determinations averaged 130 days, 23 per cent longer than the next slowest state (NSW Productivity Commission, 2021). Two cautions belong in the same breath. This is about the cost of the process, not the strength of the standard: nothing here is a case for weaker safety, environmental or planning protection, and the same White Paper records councils and the Planning Institute of Australia cautioning against treating all planning regulation as "red tape" and rushing to speed up approval times at the expense of assessment quality. And New South Wales has tried the slogan version before — the White Paper records the Audit Office of New South Wales finding that a "one-in-two-out" rule and a red tape reduction target were largely ineffective at long-term red tape reduction, with legislative complexity increasing over the life of the initiative (NSW Productivity Commission, 2021). A burden measured and published every year beats a number announced in a press release.

3. Make the fifty per cent mean New South Wales, and publish the working before the tender closes

The Industry Policy commits the state to "[a]chieve a 50% minimum local content target for future rolling transport stock by 2035" (Investment NSW, 2025), and the Tangara replacement — around 450 carriages, with procurement to commence by early 2027 — is the first serious test of it (Transport for NSW, 2025). At the same time, the draft Local Jobs First Bill defines local content as "[a]ny Australia or New Zealand-based enterprise" (NSW Government, 2025b). Both things can be true and defensible; what is not defensible is letting the second quietly satisfy the first while everyone assumes otherwise. We would have the local content methodology for the Tangara replacement — what counts as local content, how it is verified, who audits the claim, and what the consequence is for missing it — published before bids close rather than reconstructed afterwards. We would have outcomes reported with New South Wales content disaggregated from Australian and New Zealand content. And we would say clearly that this is a target inside a contract that has not yet been signed, not an achievement: as at the time of writing no Tangara replacement contract has been let (Transport for NSW, 2025).

4. Sequence the enabling works, and treat them as the project

The most expensive lesson available to New South Wales is that enabling works decide project cost. The capital cost of New Intercity Fleet enabling works grew 55 per cent to $1.1 billion by the time the rolling-stock contract was awarded in September 2016 (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2025). The same pattern is visible in Western Sydney, where a parliamentary committee found development in the Aerotropolis precincts had not kept pace with the airport and recommended that water infrastructure be expedited "to minimise further delays and allow for land development to be unlocked" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). We would have the state publish, for each industrial precinct, the servicing timetable for power, water, wastewater, road and rail access alongside the land release timetable — and report against it — so that a manufacturer deciding whether to commit capital is reading a schedule rather than a media release.

5. Fund TAFE for the decade, and publish completion honestly

The Government has already decided to remove TAFE NSW from the Smart and Skilled contestable market, a reform recommended by the NSW VET Review Interim Report of December 2023 and announced in February 2025, which the institution says will give it "a more predictable annual budget" (TAFE NSW, 2025). We support it and would extend it: a published multi-year funding envelope, not simply a more predictable annual one, so that institutes can hire and hold specialist trade teachers on contracts longer than a budget cycle. Alongside it, publish completion the way TAFE NSW already does — 48 per cent for students who commenced Australian Qualifications Framework courses in 2019, with the institution's own explanation of course duration, extended study, workplace sign-off delays and transfers attached (TAFE NSW, 2025) — and set an improvement target against it. The national data says why the urgency is real: trade completion rates are improving slowly, with the six-year completion rate for 2018 commencers at 58.2 per cent nationally and construction trades at 57.7 per cent, while total apprenticeship contracts in training fell 11.3 per cent nationally against 30 June 2024 (NCVER, 2025). Those are national figures published by NCVER, not New South Wales figures and not ABS figures. New South Wales should be able to state its own equivalents, and be judged on them.

6. Earn the social licence in the regions that host the transition, or lose the pipeline

A New South Wales upper house inquiry that received 153 submissions and one supplementary submission, held hearings in Sydney, Dubbo and Armidale and made five site visits, recommended in its first report that the Government "urgently conduct an independent cumulative impact study on the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone and ensure identified impacts are addressed", that "EnergyCo provide mental health support to landowners who are affected by the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone", and that government "investigate options to ensure payments for land acquisition are not taxed" (Portfolio Committee No. 4, 2025). The second of those recommendations is a serious finding about distress among the people whose land the transition runs through, and it should not be softened. The committee also recorded the Government's own Roadmap figures — approximately 6,300 construction jobs and 2,800 ongoing jobs, mostly regional, and for the New England REZ an intended network capacity of 8 gigawatts, up to $24 billion in private sector investment and around 2,000 operational and 6,000 construction jobs (Portfolio Committee No. 4, 2025). Those are government projections quoted by a committee, not committee findings. We support the three recommendations above, and we would attach a simple political observation to them: a transition that loses the consent of the communities hosting it will not be delivered on time, and every manufacturing job downstream of it depends on it being delivered.

7. Ask what we could be making, before we finish building the road to truck it in

New South Wales is spending $128.5 million with the Commonwealth on Stage 1 of the Port to REZ Program — upgrades at 19 locations between the Port of Newcastle and Elong Elong — with Stage 2 route planning underway for the New England REZ, and a further $115.5 million on a Newcastle Logistics Precinct beside the Port of Newcastle on the former BHP Intertrade site to expand portside storage for oversize and overmass equipment (EnergyCo, 2025). This is sensible infrastructure and we support it. We would pair it with a published component-by-component assessment of the Roadmap's equipment demand — towers, blades, nacelles, transformers, cabling, battery enclosures, structural steel — identifying which components New South Wales firms could credibly supply at the volumes the pipeline creates, and which they could not. EnergyCo's own description of the Illawarra REZ, with "strong potential for investment in new green hydrogen and steel industries, leveraging its existing workforce, robust supply chain and established manufacturing plant" (EnergyCo, 2025), suggests the state already knows where to look. An assessment like that would either produce a real industrial opportunity or dispose of the argument honestly. Either outcome is worth having.

8. Describe every instrument precisely, including the ones we support

The state's critical minerals royalty deferral is a useful case study in language. It is a $250 million scheme under which royalties may be deferred for five years from first production, for projects commencing production between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2030, limited to minerals on the Commonwealth's Critical Minerals List, restricted to applicants with a market capitalisation under $5 billion, with quarterly returns still required and repayment indexed to government borrowing rates (NSW Resources, 2024). It is a deferral. It is not a grant, it is not a subsidy, and it does not fund downstream manufacturing. We think it is a reasonable instrument. We also think that if the state cannot describe its own industry support accurately in a press release, it cannot evaluate it in a budget. We would require every industry support measure to be published with its instrument type, its cost to revenue in the year and across the forward estimates, its recipients, its sunset date and its evaluation date. That is the same discipline direction 1 applies to us.

9. Put a clock on the front door, and give credit where the idea came from

The single front door proposed in section 5 is close cousin to a recommendation a New South Wales parliamentary committee has already made, that government adopt "a centralised government contact for the planning associated within local government areas" (Public Accountability and Works Committee, 2025). We support it and we do not claim it. The contribution we would make is the accountability half: published response-time standards for each approval a manufacturer needs, published performance against those standards agency by agency, and a named officer accountable for a file rather than a shared inbox. A front door with no clock behind it is a reception desk.

Make it in New South Wales — sensibly, cleanly, and for the long term.

Statistical and market sources

ABS. (2026a). Labour Force, Australia, Detailed — data cube EQ06, employed persons by industry group of main job (ANZSIC), sex, state and territory, November 1984 onwards (cat. 6291.0.55.001), released 26 March 2026. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Division-level totals for New South Wales in this platform are our own aggregation of ANZSIC Division C groups from that cube. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/jobs/labour-force-australia-detailed/latest-release

ABS. (2026b). Australian Industry, 2024-25 financial year, released 19 June 2026. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/industry-overview/australian-industry/latest-release

AEMO. (2026a). Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q2 2026. Melbourne: Australian Energy Market Operator, July 2026. https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/quarterly-energy-dynamics-qed

AEMO. (2026b). Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q1 2026. Melbourne: Australian Energy Market Operator, April 2026. https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/quarterly-energy-dynamics-qed

NCVER. (2025). Trade completion rates strengthen; non-trade results soften — media release accompanying Apprentice and trainee completion rates 2024 and the Apprentices and trainees 2025 quarterly series. Adelaide: National Centre for Vocational Education and Research. https://www.ncver.edu.au/news-and-events/media-releases

New South Wales government sources

Audit Office of New South Wales. (2025). Rail rolling stock procurement. New South Wales Auditor-General's Report, Performance Audit, tabled 21 October 2025. Sydney: Audit Office of New South Wales. https://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/our-work/reports/rail-rolling-stock-procurement

EnergyCo. (2025). Annual Report 2024-25. Sydney: Energy Corporation of NSW, tabled in the NSW Parliament. https://www.energyco.nsw.gov.au/about-us/publications

Investment NSW. (2025). NSW Industry Policy to set ambitious new Local Manufacturing targets — ministerial release accompanying the NSW Industry Policy, 5 March 2025. Sydney: NSW Government. https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/investment-nsw/nsw-industry-policy

NSW Government. (2025a). Minns Labor Government records $10 billion spend with small & medium businesses — ministerial release, 10 August 2025. Sydney: NSW Government. https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases

NSW Government. (2025b). Local Jobs First Commission Exposure Bill released for consultation — ministerial release, 22 December 2025, consultation open to 20 February 2026. Sydney: NSW Government. https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases

NSW Government. (2026). For the first time, local workers and businesses receive priority in NSW government contracts — ministerial release, 28 May 2026. Sydney: NSW Government. https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases

NSW Productivity Commission. (2021). NSW Productivity Commission White Paper 2021: Rebooting the economy. Sydney: NSW Government. https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/nsw-productivity-and-equality-commission/document-library/white-paper

NSW Resources. (2024). Royalty deferral for new critical minerals projects, 7 November 2024, under the NSW Critical Minerals and High-Tech Metals Strategy 2024-35 (released 18 October 2024). Sydney: NSW Resources, Department of Regional NSW. https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/regional-nsw/critical-minerals-and-high-tech-metals-strategy

TAFE NSW. (2025). Annual Report 2024-2025. Sydney: TAFE NSW, tabled in the NSW Parliament. https://www.tafensw.edu.au/about-us/publications

Transport for NSW. (2025). Plans for locally-made trains roll forward — media release, 19 May 2025. Sydney: Transport for NSW. https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/news-and-events/media-releases

New South Wales parliamentary committee sources

Portfolio Committee No. 4 — Regional NSW. (2025). Impact of Renewable Energy Zones (REZ) on rural and regional communities and industries in New South Wales. First Report, Report 62, 21 August 2025. Sydney: NSW Legislative Council. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/committees/inquiries

Public Accountability and Works Committee. (2025). Western Sydney Science Park and Aerotropolis developments. Report 4, April 2025. Sydney: NSW Legislative Council. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/committees/inquiries

Commonwealth sources

Productivity Commission. (2025a). Trade and Assistance Review 2023-24. Annual report series, July 2025. Canberra: Productivity Commission. https://www.pc.gov.au/ongoing/trade-assistance/2023-24

Productivity Commission. (2025b). Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy. Inquiry report no. 109, 10 December 2025. Canberra: Productivity Commission. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-and-research/resilient-economy/report