Printing Industries supports government manufacturing Taskforce proposal

Printing Industries CEO Bill Healey has written to Prime Minister Julia Gillard supporting her proposal to establish a “whole of Government” Manufacturing Taskforce announced during last week’s Jobs Forum in Canberra.

According to Healey, one of 80 invited delegates, he asked the Prime Minister to include Printing Industries on the Taskforce as the representative of one of the most significant employer groups in manufacturing. He agreed with Forum keynote speaker Andrew Liveris that successful economies “require considered government intervention.”

Liveris is the Australian-born chief executive of US multinational Dow Chemical and co-chairman of US President Barack Obama's manufacturing advisory committee.

“We support the Taskforce proposal as a way of providing better co-ordinated use of government initiatives already in place such as Enterprise Connect and the Accelerated Apprenticeship program.

“My past experience with these types of holistic approaches is that they generally have been unsuccessful because of a lack of responsiveness on the part of individual government agencies and/or limited co-ordination across the public sector. I left the Forum optimistic that the new Taskforce will provide a way to overcome these problems,” says Healey.

Healey told the Prime Minister that the printing and related industries were grappling with major structural changes that went beyond increased international competition.

“There is a need to move from a production focussed manufacturing industry to an information management and communication based service sector. This requires successful businesses to move up the value chain to provide broad based communication services in a multi channel world.

“Many are already on the way to doing this but many more are struggling, dogged by excess capacity impacting on pricing. This makes it difficult for business to innovate and move up the value chain to embrace a broader range of information and communication services,” he says.

Healey believes the Taskforce could complement the work of the Printing Industry Working Group that has already been established by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and that together they could help identify policies and programs to assist members and the broader industry. “We are an industry sector that is undergoing significant structural change.

“Such change requires businesses to redefine themselves by converging traditional printing skills and knowledge with a range of new areas such as information and communication technologies, the creative arts and logistics and supply chain management,” he adds.

Healey welcomes the Prime Ministers support to encourage businesses to purchase Australian made and would be exploring future options for the printing industry.