Today craft enables both niche and mass production, from small-scale but high-end custom bicycles to small, medium and large-scale textile manufacturing. If Australia is to (re)build its domestic manufacturing capacity following over four decades of operations closing and/or offshoring, renewed support for training in at risk manual craft skills embedded and working in collaboration with industry and alongside digital technologies are essential to both innovation and capacity development.

However, in Australia today, despite the emphasis on restoring the country’s sovereign manufacturing capacity following the supply chain interruptions of COVID-19, as well as wider geopolitical uncertainty and the climate crisis, much local production remains under threat on multiple fronts. Key among these is the loss, or simply a lack of, skilled expertise and thus opportunities for innovation in the Australian making workforce.

This report draws upon findings from an Australian Research Council–funded research project that sought to identify where the craft skills required to sustain and grow future making are located across the national economy. The project found that in 2021 Australia’s craft economy employed 116,538 people (1.1% of the total workforce) and generated $AU19.2 billion gross value added (1.0% of the total).

By comparison, Australia’s craft economy is slightly larger in size and impact than the sports economy, which in 2016–17 supported 128,000 jobs and contributed $AU14.5 billion to gross domestic product (KPMG 2020). Notably, the Australian craft economy has been in decline since 2006, while the overall economy has continued to grow. This rate of decline gathered pace from 2011 to 2016 but has stabilised in the period 2016 to 2021. In the 2021 census the actual number of skilled craft workers decreased, but their income and thus gross value added (GVA) grew, evidencing the ongoing value of these skills to the future of making in Australia, but also their growing scarcity.