Building state capacities for a Future Made in Australia: institutionally embedded industrial policy

Australia’s deindustrialisation has produced a structural trap, locking in dependence on resources in decline due to decarbonisation. Simultaneously, lack of industrial capacity has impeded Australia’s net-zero transition, despite vast renewable power and minerals immensely valuable to the transitioning global economy. Coupling decarbonisation with reindustrialisation, the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia (FMA) seeks to accelerate the net-zero transition while overcoming the nation’s lock-in to declining forms of resource extraction. This paper critically appraises FMA as an industrial policy response to the energy transition. Contrasting with much domestic criticism of it, FMA is largely framed by neoliberal assumptions and is at the weaker end of contemporary industrial policies. As constituted, FMA falls short of its own objectives, in scale and structure. Nevertheless, the FMA can become a more expansive industrial strategy, geared to an explicit generational mission of reindustrialisation to drive decarbonisation, increased onshore value adding and national sovereign capabilities. This expanded FMA remit requires commitment to sustained institutional processes and the development of presently lacking state capacities.