Ambitious Australia Meets Industrial Statecraft: What Minister Ayres Sees and The Work Still to be Done

John H. Howard, April 14, 2026

Minister Tim Ayres delivered his first National Press Club address on 25 March 2026, a week after launching the Strategic Review of R&D (SERD) panel’s Ambitious Australia report. The speech, Smarter, Stronger, Safer, and More Resilient: A Future Made in Australia Backed by Research and Development, offered the Government’s first substantive framing of how the report will be used. That framing is probably not what many had expected.

The Minister draws selectively on the SERD’s research system diagnosis to support a much broader industrial policy agenda. The report’s innovation architecture, including its proposed National Innovation Council, six-pillar structure, and RD&I framing, is largely absent from the speech. The report enters as an input to industrial statecraft, not as a standalone reform program.

Three elements from Ambitious Australia did make it into the speech:

• Diagnosis of fragmentation: “160 research and development programs across 13 portfolios” that “cannot deliver the scale and impact we need.”

• The case for foundational research, acknowledged with the observation that “we wouldn’t have wi-fi without it.”

• The quantum of Commonwealth investment, around $15 billion annually including $1 billion for CSIRO, deployed to frame the task as alignment rather than new expenditure.

Each element is used instrumentally. The fragmentation data justifies the Government’s consolidation drive. The foundational research argument supports continued public funding. The investment figure sets up the message that the priority is “getting the most out of our investment,” not spending more.

What the speech leaves out

The omissions are extensive: The National Innovation Council is not mentioned by name; the six national innovation pillars; the National Strategy Advisory Councils; the National Strategic Initiatives; and the “RD&I flywheel” metaphor. The RDTI reform package, which occupies much of the SERD report, is not referenced. The capital market reforms, the workforce chapter, PhD stipend increases, and superannuation settings are all passed over.

The Minister chose not to preview any of these in a set-piece address to the National Press Club. Whether they surface in the 2026–27 Budget remains to be seen, but the silence is hard to read as anything other than a signal that the Government is not, at this stage, committing to the SERD’s system design. The panel produced an integrated package “designed to shift Australia’s growth trajectory”. The Government seems to have other views about the nature of this trajectory.

The industrial policy frame

The Minister’s own framework, reflected in his speech, is built around four themes: focus, statecraft, scale, and enabling capability. These are his categories, drawn from an industrial policy logic in which R&D is one instrument among several, alongside procurement, trade policy, energy security, supply chain sovereignty, and defence capability.

The substance of the speech is dominated by actions taken independently of the SERD: metals processing interventions at Mount Isa, Port Pirie, Hobart, Whyalla, and Gladstone; National Reconstruction Fund investments; anti-dumping reforms; data centre expectations; and the Horizon Europe association. The one concrete new commitment, association with Horizon Europe backed by a matching contribution from the Group of Eight universities, connects to research capability but was negotiated outside the SERD framework. The report provides supporting evidence for the research component, but the frame belongs to the Minister.

This interpretation is confirmed by the vocabulary. His keywords are “industrial,” “resilience,” “capability,” and “security.”

The sentence that reveals the message

The most telling line in the speech may be this one:

I am ambitious for reform, and to extend that ambition beyond the research and development system to the whole industrial and innovation system.

That phrasing acknowledges Ambitious Australia as a valuable research and development exercise. It accepts, implicitly, that the “whole industrial and innovation system” is a larger domain than the report addresses. It would appear also to claim a larger domain for the Minister and the Government rather than for the panel.

Read alongside The Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation's eight SERD Innovation Insights published over the past four weeks, the Minister's framing aligns with views within the innovation management and innovation studies communities and among many other commentators that Ambitious Australia does not constitute an innovation system reform.

What this signals

The panel warned explicitly against cherry-picking, arguing that its recommendations are "mutually reinforcing" and that partial adoption would amount to "incremental changes and band-aid solutions." The Minister does not directly acknowledge this warning. He describes the task ahead as requiring "system level change" extending beyond "a single Budget or a single term of government." This is the language of sequenced, selective adoption.

The SERD's recommendations will, it appears, be assessed against their contribution to the Government's reindustrialisation objectives, Future Made in Australia priorities, and economic security goals. Recommendations that align will be progressed. Those that do not may have to wait. This is a familiar pattern: research system reviews produce internally coherent packages, and governments select the elements that serve their broader agenda. The SERD panel anticipated this risk, and its warning against selective adoption may prove prescient.

The broader innovation system, encompassing marketing and demand-driven innovation, management capability, absorptive capacity, industrial restructuring, design and creative capability, and place-based ecosystems, is largely absent from Ambitious Australia and remains unaddressed in the Minister's speech. His industrial interventions, however, touch on several of these elements, and the framing of system-level change over multiple terms of government leaves open the expectation that a more comprehensive innovation framework will follow as the policy sequence unfolds.

Where this takes us

For those who have tracked Australian innovation policy across several decades, the pattern is familiar. The research system receives periodic, careful review and attention. The innovation system, which determines whether research, ideas and entrepreneurship translate into economic and social outcomes, does not appear to carry the same ongoing priority.

The risk is that innovation capability will continue to be addressed through uncoordinated, relatively small, and short-term program interventions distributed across Commonwealth, State/Territory and Local Governments, without the workable institutional architecture needed to connect them.

The current Government's industrial ambitions are more deliberate than those of its recent predecessors, and that shift is very welcome. A coherent national innovation and industrial framework capable of lifting productivity and strengthening Australia's international competitiveness and national security is clearly on the agenda.

The importance of this agenda is sharpened as AI emerges as a transformative general-purpose technology capable of augmenting human capabilities and accelerating the industrial transformation required to move beyond dependence on a resource-based economy.

AI is also becoming embedded in machinery and equipment in new industries, such as advanced manufacturing. This opens a practical pathway to rebuild and extend Australia's manufacturing capability at a time when sovereign production capacity has renewed strategic significance.

Dr John H. Howard is a Policy Adviser and Executive Director of the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, Honorary Visiting Professor at UTS, and Senior Board Adviser for Innovation Policy at Software Australia.

Source Material

Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation. (2026). Innovation Insights on the Strategic Examination of Research and Development (Series). Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, Sydney.

Ayres, T. (2026, March 25). Smarter, stronger, safer, and more resilient: A Future Made in Australia backed by research and development [Address to the National Press Club, Canberra].

Howard, J. H. (2025). Handbook of innovation ecosystems: Placemaking. economics. business. governance. Acton Institute Publishing, Sydney.

Howard, J. H. (2025). Australia's missing innovation policy: Will it ever be found? Acton Institute Publishing, Sydney.

Howard, J. H. (2026). Making Sense of AI in 2o26: A framework for policy and practice. Decision-making in a time of opportunity, uncertainty and risk. Acton Institute Publishing, Sydney.

Strategic Examination of Research and Development Panel. (2026). Ambitious Australia. Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources.