Professor Mazzucato Meets with Australian PM Anthony Albanese during Whistlestop Tour of Australia

On March 15, Professor Mazzucato, Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), concluded her 5-day trip to Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne. During her first visit to Australia since the federal Labor government was elected in 2022, Professor Mazzucato interacted with more than two thousand people across four sold-out speaking events and met privately with senior politicians, civil servants, academics, and trade unionists.

Read her interview in The Saturday Paper with Emily Barratt

Read the Australian Financial Review with Hans van Leeuwen

The visit comes at a critical juncture for Australia, as its Labor government grapples with high interest rates, stagnant growth, declining productivity, low business investment, and an overreliance on fossil fuel extraction. However, Australia boasts an abundance of natural resources that are vital for green technologies and is well placed to turn these challenges into opportunities for investment and innovation.

In her meeting with Prime Minister Albanese, Professor Mazzucato made the case for a challenge-driven, green industrial policy to help bring the government’s economic policy into alignment with the country’s social and environmental priorities. Productivity and growth are not the mission. They outcomes of a well-designed economic policies that mobilise cross-sectoral investment and innovation. In her interview with Kirsten Aiken on ABC’s ‘The Business’, Professor Mazzucato argued that the government’s Productivity Commission should either change its name or its mandate.

A key institution at the heart of the government’s strategy is the National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), the country’s new A$15 billion development bank. In her meeting with Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Professor Mazzucato shared IIPP’s work on embedding conditionalities in public funding programmes, which could help the bank accelerate the transition a low-carbon economy and support working people. 

The government is exploring opportunities to bring business, unions, and civil society together for the green transition. In 2024, the government plans to legislate a Net Zero Authority, an institution that will assist workers, communities, and sectors to help drive the energy transition. To ensure the country’s transition is both green and just, the country’s trade unions should have a seat at the table.

Other key events were the three governmental workshops with the federal, Victorian and New South Wales governments. With politicians and civil servants in attendance, the workshops explored how the government could redesign its procurement policies to be more outcomes-oriented and rebuild the government’s public sector capabilities, instead of outstoucing to McKinsey and other big consultancies. 

Professor Mazzucato would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Anthony Albanese, Dr Jim Chalmers, Ed Husic (Minister for Industry and Science), Independent Senator David Pocock, Professor Doug Hilton (CEO, CSIRO), Martijn Wilder AM (Chair of the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation), Dr Cathy Foley AO (Australia's Chief Scientist), Daniel Mookhey (NSW Treasurer), Tim Pallas MP (Victorian Treasurer), and many others for being available to meet privately and/or share the stage during her key addresses.

On the final day of her visit, Professor Mazzucato joined Sharan Burow (former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Senator Tim Ayres, Michele O’Neil (current ACTO President) and Katherine McConnell (CEO and Chair of Brighte) at an ACTU event that discussed their exciting community campaign – which includes unions, First Nations leaders, community groups and other organisations – to deliver net zero by 2050 and create over a million good jobs in the process.  Explicitly informed by Professor Mazzucato’s mission framework, the ACTU’s campaign is a testament to the domestic appetite for industrial reform and the IIPP’s growing global impact.