Fashion came to Capital Hill on Thursday when the Australian Fashion Council unveiled a 10-year plan to reinvigorate Australia’s textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) manufacturing capability.
Launched at Parliament House in Australia’s capital city of Canberra, the National Manufacturing Strategy was developed in partnership with heritage bootmaker R.M. Williams, which has almost tripled its own manufacturing capacity in Adelaide, South Australia since Australian private equity company Tattarang acquired the frim from L Catterton in October 2020. In fiscal 2025, R.M. Williams reported sales of 324 million Australian dollars ($208 million at average exchange for the period), up 11 percent on 2024.
The council hopes to replicate some of that manufacturing momentum across the broader industry, which is worth 27.2 billion Australian dollars to the national economy annually according to a May 2021 AFC report citing Ernst & Young data ($21 billion at May 2021 exchange). This represents 1.5 percent of the country’s GDP, employing 489,000 workers, with exports accounting for 7.2 billion Australian dollars ($6 billion).
Within this, the domestic manufacturing sector—63 percent of which is located in the east coast states of New South Wales and Victoria—contributes at least 2.6 billion Australian dollars ($1.8 billion) to the economy, according to the 2024 AFC Victorian TCF Manufacturing Report, which did not include NSW data. Over 1.4 billion Australian dollars ($950.3 million) in wages are paid in Victoria to 27,000 TCF factory workers, of which women comprise 58 percent, making it one of the most significant manufacturing sectors for women’s economic participation.
Due to the dismantling of import tariffs after the 1980s, 97 percent of Australia’s TCF production is based offshore, often using Australian wool and cotton which is imported back as finished product.
Australia is the world’s largest exporter of greasy wool, but 85 percent of the wool clip is sent to China for early-stage processing. More than 99 percent of Australia’s raw cotton (which is projected to generate 3.3 billion Australian dollars or $2.24 billion in 2025/2026, according to Cotton Australia) is processed offshore, predominantly in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India.
The National Manufacturing Strategy hinges on three strategic pillars: activating demand, securing the workforce of the future and accelerating digital transformation. If fully leveraged, economic modeling by Melbourne’s RMIT University and RPS Group projects this could generate 1.4 billion Australian dollars ($990.4 million) in cumulative uplift over five years, growing the manufacturing sector to approximately 2.9 billion Australian dollars ($2.05 billion), adding 1,000 new skilled jobs, with an additional 212 million Australian dollars ($150 million) paid in wages annually by 2031, with half of those jobs anticipated to be filled by women.
The strategy aligns with a plethora of existing federal government policy initiatives, including the Future Made in Australia Act 2024, the updated Commonwealth Procurement Rules, the Buy Australian Plan, the National Skills Agreement and a keen focus on women’s economic participation.
Poised to help the AFC reach the ears of government is a newly formed non partisan group called the Parliamentary Friends of Australian Fashion & Textiles, which is comprised of more than 50 federal members of Parliament and senators, a large percentage of whom were in attendance for the launch.
“Today is a milestone and it’s going to be hard work, there’s no doubt about that, but the support and collaboration is there and that has been a big roadblock, historically” AFC executive chair Marianne Perkovic told Sourcing Journal. “We [the industry] sit in this interesting space where we didn’t have a minister that specifically looked after textiles and fashion and so the portfolio was spread across agriculture, women, sustainability etc. The way we tried to come around that was to do the Parliamentary Friends group. Now there’s a joint alignment and individual ministers and parliamentarians can take the piece that they advocate for, but collectively, we can now be better represented in Parliament.”
In a bid to activate demand, the AFC is setting its preliminary sights on clawing back some of the Australian government’s procurement business. Since 2022, 17 Commonwealth agencies have awarded over 790 million Australian dollars in clothing and uniform contracts ($531 million in average exchange for the period), with the Department of Defence accounting for 82 percent of the total contract value, with fibre and finished garment production mostly outsourced to China.
The 114 year-old company Australian Defence Apparel, which manufactures around 600,000 uniforms a year for the Australian defense forces, police and emergency services, was among a small showcase of local manufacturers and brands that flanked the event’s breakfast tables. Also featured: the 152 year-old Tasmania-based Waverley Mills, Australia’s last fully vertical woollen mill and Silver Fleece, South Australia’s last knitting mill, which was founded in 1951 and rescued from liquidation in 2024 by Adelaide entrepreneurs Dean and Melanie Flintoft.
“It [Silver Fleece] is a business that had been shrinking for 20 years” said Dean Flintoft, whose new customers include R.M. Williams. “We’ve brought a designer into the business and a programmer for the knitting machines so we can do a lot of sampling now which the business couldn’t do previously. We’ve got new knitting machines, new circular machines, a dye house, stentering and finishing equipment. We’ve basically made it a one-stop shop”.
To address Australia’s ageing TCF manufacturing workforce, which has a median age of 57, strategy proposals include lobbying the federal government to co-invest in a nationally coordinated TCF manufacturing careers program and designate TCF manufacturing as a priority apprenticeship sector.
R.M. Williams is a case study on how this could work. To achieve its current workforce of 450 the company aligned with the South Australian government and its Technical and Further Education [TAFE] arm to revive the state’s mothballed Certificate III in Leather Production in 2023 and the following year introduced the new TAFE Industrial Sewing Skill Set.
“We did a big fact-finding mission of all the suppliers and makers in Australia and found a lot of small makers, very disjointed from each other, often immigrants” said R.M. Williams chief operating officer Tara Moses, the former director of manufacturing for Red Wing Shoes, who moved to Australia to join R.M. Williams in 2022. “The skill set is actually here, it’s not completely gone. But the time is now [to train a new generation] because these are a lot of aging makers”.
A key focus of the strategy’s technology pillar is the development of shared advanced manufacturing infrastructure or “smart” factories—inspired by Germany’s Industry 4.0 initiative of networked, digitized production, that’s heavily focused on boosting productivity at small and medium-sized enterprises. And notably, in Australia’s case, co-locating these in proximity to fiber production areas, to encourage the rebuilding of early stage fiber processing. This would capitalize on already nascent industry interest in hedging against biosecurity risks, trade bans, tariffs and provenance issues arising from European Union’s impending Digital Product Passport.
“There is a really, really good opportunity here if we seize it to see the rebirth and the significant growth of the industry moving forward” said Matt Burnell, the Member for the South Australian electorate of Spence where R.M. Williams is headquartered and one of three co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of Australian Fashion & Textiles group, whose own forebear George Burnell ran a wool scouring facility in Adelaide in the late 19th century.
Added R.M. Williams’ Moses, “Australia has got something nobody else in the world could have—the cotton and the wool and the potential to take that from farm to fashion”.