Why We Still Manufacture in Australia

Key Takeaways

• Australian TCF manufacturing employment has fallen sharply, from about 115,000 workers in 1989 to roughly 24,000 today.
• Australia now imports more than $2 billion in clothing and textiles each month.
• Local manufacturing gives PPE suppliers greater control over quality, compliance, lead times, and supply chain visibility.
• Garments remain a high-risk category for modern slavery because global apparel supply chains are long and difficult to audit.
• Australian-made safety workwear costs more, but it reduces operational, ethical, and supply chain risk.

A founder’s perspective on the real cost and value of making things here.

There’s a particular sound a factory floor makes when it’s running properly. The rhythm of industrial sewing machines, the movement of fabric rolls, the quiet focus of experienced machinists who know exactly what they’re doing. I’ve heard that sound for a long time now, and honestly, it still tells me more about how our business is tracking than any dashboard ever could.

Reflective Fabrications has been manufacturing high-visibility safety workwear and compliant PPE in Melbourne since 1988. When I acquired the business in 2025, that history came with it—and so did the question I kept asking myself: Why are we still doing it here?

It’s a fair question. Manufacturing locally is harder. Labour costs more. Overheads are higher. The margin pressure is real, and it doesn’t let up. There have been points when I’ve looked honestly at the numbers and fully understood why so many businesses decided to move offshore. I’m not naive about that.

But I’ve also watched what happens when manufacturing disappears from a country. And the more I looked, the more I came to see that keeping production here wasn’t just an operational decision. It was economic, strategic, and ethical. The more I understood the full picture, the more convinced I became that it was the right one.

Australian Manufacturing Didn’t Disappear by Accident

The Collapse of Local TCF Industry

At its peak in 1989, Australian textile, clothing, and footwear (TCF) manufacturing employed over 115,000 people full-time. Today, that number sits at around 24,000. That’s an 80% collapse over 35 years, and it didn’t happen because Australian workers stopped being skilled or because local manufacturers stopped caring about quality.

It happened because, for a long stretch, the industry optimised almost entirely for short-term cost. And offshore labour was cheaper. Full stop. So factories closed, machinery was sold, machinists retired, and the knowledge that took decades to build walked out the door with them.

What Import Dependence Actually Looks Like

The consequence of that is now visible in the import numbers. Textile, clothing, and footwear imports into Australia are running at over $2 billion per month. Every month. We are extraordinarily dependent on offshore supply for something as basic as what people wear to work.

I’m not making a political point here. Globalisation created real efficiencies and genuinely lifted living standards in a lot of countries. I understand that. But there’s a difference between a strategic decision to integrate into global supply chains and an unplanned collapse of domestic capability. What Australia experienced in TCF manufacturing was largely the latter.

When manufacturing disappears, you lose more than products. You lose skills, tools, technical knowledge, and the industrial capacity to respond when circumstances change. Rebuilding that is slow, expensive, and genuinely difficult if it’s possible at all.

Why We Chose to Keep Manufacturing Here 

Quality Control You Can Actually Walk Into

The honest answer is that it started with control. When you make things in your own facility, you can walk the floor. You can catch a problem before it becomes a shipment issue. You can adjust a specification, change a fabric, or modify a process and see the result within days, not months.

In safety workwear, that matters enormously. Our products need to comply with Australian standards. They go onto job sites and into hazardous environments, and in some cases they’re the thing standing between a worker and a serious injury. I’m not willing to hand that quality control to a factory I can visit once a year if I’m lucky.

Speed and Responsiveness

There’s also the question of lead times. When a client needs a batch of compliant PPE quickly because a contract has been awarded, because their existing stock doesn’t meet a new standard, or because something has changed on site, we can respond. We’re not waiting eight to fourteen weeks for a container from the other side of the world. That operational agility has real commercial value.

I’ve also watched experienced machinists solve production problems in minutes that would have taken days to explain over email to an offshore supplier. That kind of operational knowledge doesn’t appear on a balance sheet, but it shapes outcomes every single day.

Supply Chain Resilience

The supply chain disruptions of recent years made the risk calculus even clearer. In mid-2025, 47% of Australian industrial businesses reported active supply chain disruptions — up 12% from nine months prior. 44% said they planned to increase supply chain investment in 2026. During the major disruptions, we had clients calling because shipments they’d relied on simply weren’t arriving. In some cases, timelines blew out by months. We faced pressure too. But having manufacturing capability here meant we could respond far faster than businesses relying entirely on imports.

Local manufacturing is not nostalgia. It is risk management. It is the ability to keep your commitments when the global system has a bad quarter.

The Economic Value of Australian Manufacturing  

More Than a Factory: A Network

People sometimes frame local manufacturing as a sacrifice, paying more to do something domestically that could be done cheaper elsewhere. But that framing misses most of what’s actually happening economically.

In Victoria alone, TCF manufacturing generated over $930 million for the Australian economy in 2023. The sector employs over 9,000 people in the state, representing nearly a third of the national TCF workforce. Victorian TCF exports were worth $334 million — outperforming the state’s wine exports by close to $200 million. That’s not a struggling cottage industry. That’s a sector with serious economic weight.

Across the country, clothing manufacturing generates $12.4 billion in revenue annually. The broader fashion industry employs 111,000 people across 42,000 businesses. Every factory that stays open is feeding that network.

The Multiplier Effect

Manufacturing also has multiplier effects that purchasing imported products simply doesn’t. Every dollar spent in local manufacturing supports surrounding businesses, fabric suppliers, trim suppliers, machinery technicians, logistics providers, and small firms that depend on the trade. The small business and family enterprise ecosystem feeding into advanced manufacturing contributes more than $86.6 billion to Australia’s GDP annually. It is a network, not just a collection of individual businesses.

The Human Cost of Closure

I think about the machinists in our facility. Many of them have been doing this for a long time. They’ve built genuine expertise. When our factory runs, those wages go into local households, local schools, and local communities. When factories close, that doesn’t get replaced easily. The workers often don’t transition into other industries, particularly older workers, workers with lower formal education levels, and women, who make up 53% of the TCF manufacturing workforce. They frequently leave the labour force entirely.

The economic case for local manufacturing isn’t just about the factory floor. It’s about everything the factory sustains around it.

How Local Manufacturing Improves Supply Chain Transparency

Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Visibility

This part of the conversation has changed significantly over the past decade, and I think rightly so.

Garments and apparel are among the highest-risk product categories globally for modern slavery and forced labour. Long, complex supply chains make visibility difficult. A brand might know its Tier 1 supplier, the factory that does the final assembly, but have very little visibility into Tier 2 or Tier 3, where fabric is woven, dyed, or finished. That’s where labour abuses are most likely to occur and where they’re hardest to detect.

Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 only requires entities with an annual turnover above $100 million to submit disclosure statements. In 2020/21, only 39 fashion and apparel entities met that threshold out of roughly 13,551 registered clothing retail businesses in Australia. The vast majority of the industry has no formal obligation to look. Shortening the supply chain and manufacturing locally materially reduces that exposure. We know exactly where our products are made, under what conditions, and by whom.

Environmental Responsibility

The environmental picture is also significant. The global fashion and textile sector contributes between 8% and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Australia generates 41 kilograms of post-consumer textile waste per capita every year, more than double the European rate. Around 80% of discarded textiles end up in landfills. These are sector-wide problems that the industry is going to have to grapple with seriously.

Procurement and ESG Expectations

From a procurement standpoint, the landscape is also shifting. Government contracts increasingly require businesses to meet specific ESG and sustainability outcomes. The Future Made in Australia Act commits the federal government to stimulating domestic manufacturing investment and safeguarding supply chain sovereignty. State governments are building local content requirements into procurement for uniforms, workwear, and PPE. Businesses that have already built transparent, verifiable local supply chains are better placed to meet those requirements—not because they built around government policy, but because they built the business properly from the start.

What Happens If We Lose Manufacturing Completely? 

The Knowledge That Lives in People

I want to be careful here not to overstate the case. Australia doesn’t need to manufacture everything. There are legitimate arguments for international trade, specialisation, and comparative advantage. I’m not arguing against any of that.

But there’s a difference between deliberately choosing what to manufacture onshore and what to source globally and simply losing the ability to manufacture anything at all.

Once a factory closes, the machinery gets sold. The machinists retire or move on. The institutional knowledge—the understanding of how to set up a run, how to handle a particular fabric, how to solve a production problem—doesn’t sit in a manual somewhere. It lives in people. And when those people leave, it’s extraordinarily hard to get back.

What COVID Made Obvious

The COVID-19 years made this painfully clear. A country can lose industrial capability slowly enough that nobody notices until it’s urgently needed. When global supply chains stalled, countries that had retained domestic manufacturing capability in critical product categories — including PPE—were in a fundamentally different position than those that hadn’t. Australia scrambled. The gaps in domestic capability became obvious very quickly.

Who Bears the Cost

The people who bear the cost of factory closures most acutely are also often the most vulnerable. Women make up 53% of the TCF manufacturing workforce in Australia. Research consistently shows that when manufacturing jobs disappear, workers in this category, along with older workers and those with lower formal educational qualifications, frequently exit the labour force entirely rather than transitioning to other industries. That’s not just an economic statistic. It represents real livelihoods, real families, real communities.

Australia does not need to manufacture everything. But losing the ability to manufacture anything is dangerous. Industrial capability, once lost, is not easily rebuilt.

Why We’re Still Here

We’ve been manufacturing safety workwear in Melbourne since 1988. That’s not a marketing line — it’s just the reality of how we’ve operated. In that time, I’ve watched a lot of Australian manufacturers make the decision to move offshore. Some made it work. Many discovered the trade-offs were larger than they expected: less control, longer lead times, weaker visibility across the supply chain, and far less flexibility when conditions changed.

We made a different decision. And I can tell you that the reasons we stayed have evolved over the years. In the early days, it was primarily about control and quality. Then it became about supply chain resilience. Then, about ethics and transparency. Then, about the economic and community case for keeping the capability alive.

All of those reasons are still valid. They compound, rather than compete.

There’s also something I think about when I walk the factory floor and see our team at work. These are people with genuine skills. They produce things that matter, safety gear that has to perform in real conditions, where someone’s visibility on a job site could save their life. There’s a seriousness to that work that I think the industry sometimes loses when it becomes too abstract.

Local manufacturing is harder. The costs are real. The margin pressure doesn’t go away. But when I look at the full picture — operational control, supply chain resilience, economic contribution, ethical transparency, community impact, and long-term industrial capability — I don’t see a sacrifice.

I see capability worth protecting.

If your organisation needs compliant Australian-made safety workwear, hi-vis garments, or PPE with greater supply chain visibility, speak with Reflective Fabrications about local manufacturing options.