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PRIME MINISTER
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE RON P. J. KEATING, XP
ERICSSON AUSTRALIA TELECOMM( UNICATIONS
BROADMEADOWS, AUGUST 26 1993
It is a great pleasure to be here today.
In manufacturing, the name Broadmeadows has usually meant
one thing Ford Australia.
Without the slightest disrespect to Ford, let me say that
Broadmeadows should mean one more thing in Australian
manufacturing Ericsson Australia.
It gets the balance right small items here, large items'
up the road.
Both innovative, both exporters, both very significant
employers. Both multinational companies with their parents abroad
but both making vital contributions to the Australian
economy and helping to take it in the direction it must
go. To the Asia-Pacific, and to the world.
Ericsson have been here for a long time they've been in
Australia for a century, and in Broadmeadows for thirty
years. They have long been a company of the kind Australia needs
and, I'm pleased to say, is now producing a company
which believes in success through innovation.
The changes in telecommunications over a century have
been remarkable of course from the phone you bolted to
the wall to the phone you put in your top pocket.
But there has never been a change like the one which is
occurring now.
There has never been a change so dramatic, nor one so
full of possibility.
We are seeing Australia assume the status of a regional
and, indeed, world leader in telecommunications.
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We are seeing that leadership translated into rapid
export growth in the Asia-Pacific.
The Government estimates that Australia has the potential
to achieve telecommunications exports of $ 2 billion by
1997 and much of that will undoubtedly be in our
region. It is a strategically important industry for Australia.
With one of the most advanced telecommunications networks
in the world we have the base for expansion into Asia.
I was in South Korea and China a few months ago and the
opportunities were plain to see: over and above our
traditional minerals and energy and agricultural
products, there are burgeoning markets for things we do
well and things we make well things like computer
software, education services, processed food,
environmental services and, perhaps most obviously of
all, telecommunications.
And the same opportunities exist throughout the region.
If telecommunications is a strategic industry for
Australia's economy, Ericsson Australia is strategic to
the industry.
Ericsson Australia has extended its markets in the Asia-
Pacific to China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka,
Cambodia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
And there can be no doubt that in these countries
Ericsson's reputation has contributed to Australia's
reputation as a telecommunications leader.
Today I am pleased to be given the opportunity to
announce some of the initiatives in the expanded role
Ericsson Australia will soon be playing in the Asia-
Pacific. The company has decided to extend its operations in
the rapidly developing economic regions of China by
expanding its marketing of Australian manufactured
telephone exchange switching products into two new
provinces Sichuan and Liaoning.
Also in China, Ericsson Australia will supply
support for the operations of mobile telephone
networks in 11 provinces, catering to more than
600,000 existing customers.
In future, where Australian companies win major
overseas contracts that involve the supply of
Ericsson product, that product will be supplied by
Ericsson Australia as they are already supplying
the mobile telephone operations of Telecom Australia
in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. P) I PRESS OFFICE( it 003
Ericsson Australia has also been designated as a
major supply centre for analogue mobile telephone
network equipment f or the Ericsson Group's worldwide
market.
In a decision which establishes the company's
Research and Development Centre as a major exporter
of Australian technology, the Ericsson Australia
designed and developed Queuing System, which has
already generated $ 180 m~ illion in exports, is to be
incorporated in Ericsson PABX systems and sold
world-wide
And, finally, I understand the Group is
considering the feasibility of establishing an
Information Technology Centre in Australia to
service the communication needs of the Asia-Pacific.
I was in Tasmania earlier this week at Ulverstone, where
Pacific Dunlop are investing in a potato processing
operation which promises to secure that region's future
by securing a major slice of the Asian market.
The key to their operation is the faith to invest coupled
to international Best Practice from the ground up.
In other words, making the growing and processing and the
management and labour, as sophisticated as any in the
world. I could have gone to any number of other companies around
Australia this week and seen the same sort of thing
happening and I intend to go to many of them in the
next few months.
The lesson everywhere is the same Australia's economic
future rests on companies like this.
Companies which are innovative, determined to export,
intent on establishing at every level from the technology
to the labour force, standards which are second to none
in the world.
The Government is encouraging the growth of these
companies. In fact I might say I have been encouraging them for a
decade since as a Government we decided that Australia
could be a modern manufacturing nation indeed had to be
a modern manufacturing nation and set about the task of
making the necessary changes to the economic structure
and the business and industrial culture.
We are now seeing the fruits of our labour.
The increased export business that flows from today's
announcements here, make it very clear that the reforms
we are introducing for the telecommunications industry
extend well beyond the measures which put Telecom and
Optus into competition.
In the 1990' s we're seeing Australian companies change
direction. We're seeing the emergence of new companies born of the
new export culture, and the new awareness of
opportunities in the Asia-Pacific.
And we're seeing when we look at the growth in
manufactured exports how absolutely essential it was to
make those changes.
For without that growth we would now be in a genuinely
dire economic circumstances, and we would have a
genuinely dire future.
Today, despite our problems, we have a marvellous future,
As a nation we have the best chance in our history to
secure the kind of long term economic security which will
underwrite our way of life and assure Australians of
employment. We have to find the solutions to unemployment and we
expect the major study we have commissioned to give us a
more comprehensive and effective strategy than we have
ever had.
We are not alone in this. President Clinton of course
has called for an unemployment summit. In Europe they
are doing the same.
Unemployment is the great curse of our era and overcoming
it will teat our ingenuity and our commitment to the
nation and each other. It will test all of us.
But we do know that at least part of the solution a
large part of it lies in the initiative and success of
companies like Ericsson Australia.
Because through them and I mean from the upper levels
of management to the men and women who work in the
offic ' es and on the factory floor through companies like
this one, our economic success will be assured and
employment in substantial measure restored.
That's why I say that for all the hard work we in
Government put in and even for all the flak we took
along the way ultimately success depends on not on
Government but on companies like this; and it is
companies like this with the vision and the courage who
properly deserve the credit.
You will know that in the Budget and in other measures
taken in recent times the Government is seeking to
encourage the development of small and medium sized
manufacturing exporters.
But we also encourage the role of multinational companies
like Ericsson, with their broad exposure to world markets
and the market access they can provide for Australia.
Ericsson Australia have earned their expanded role on the
world, and by doing that they are helping take Australia
into those markets where our future lies.
So I congratulate you all and thank you for inviting me
along.