Hopes for the Australian Bioeconomy
The recent Australian Federal Election and the first speech by the new Minister for Industry have inspired some reflections on my hopes and dreams for the Australian bioeconomy
Life is high-throughput right now, and I'm getting pen to paper less often than I'd like. Thank you for reading and for waiting, and a special thank you to all those new subscribers for joining the journey.
If you aren't aware, I am based in Australia and we recently had national elections here. The Minister for Industry gave his first speech on 20 May. There are some pearls threaded through the speech, including how the Honorable Tim Ayers grew up studying in the library of a rural Agronomist Research Station his father worked at. Throw in some Fremen and a civil war and I’d be getting some heavy Dune vibes.
The recent election and this speech has led me to reflect on what my hopes and dreams are for the Australian bioeconomy across the nation’s 48th Parliament. I have always believed a balanced dose of techno-optimism and political pragmatism weaves the policy yeast of national economic strategy. Therefore in this post I've decided to wear my feelings on my sleeve more than usual.
I have always believed Australia should be a global leader in biomanufacturing, if only the country could wake up to the full potential of its bioeconomy.
A National Bioeconomy Strategy
More than medicine, that was my pitch in 2023.
My biggest hope for the 48th Parliament is that by its end the country will have a national bioeconomy strategy built on the idea that the bioeconomy is more than medicine. This strategy will lay down a vision for valorising sovereign biomass and connecting the Australian bioeconomy to regional economic powerhouses, and through them to the world. Many of the elements are in place to enable this vision. I now want to see the Australian Government explicitly buy into this national opportunity.
An Australian Bioeconomy Strategy will advance and further professionalise upstream and downstream sectors of industrial biotechnology. It will normalise the languages of nature co-design, biomanufacturing and biomass aggregation.
I’ve long been of the view that both top down and bottom up action is needed to catalyse rural revitalisation with the most advanced manufacturing technologies on the planet - engineering biology. Agriculture, forestry, aquaculture, municipal waste, rail and gas networks, they all need to come together under the newly appointed Government in consultation groups to lead policy co-design on upstream biomass aggregation and distribution. A national strategy will drive states and local councils to implement policies that pull investment into regional precincts of substrate-specialised biomass valorisation. Canola over here, molasses over there, lignin down there, chicken feathers up here, gaseous waste in that pipeline. You get the idea.
Now couple this with the need for pilot, demo and commercial scale biomanufacturing infrastructure across those same regions and substrate specialities. Any national bioeconomy strategy must have public-private first-of-a-kind investment roadmap at the heart of its vision. Australia needs to build-to-learn, and we have an opportunity to completely re-imagine what distributed manufacturing can look like at a commercial scale across our regions and cities.
Indeed, every nation has this opportunity. As with every nation, if Australia doesn't seize the bioeconomic opportunity, it will lose the window to become a technology maker and doom itself to being a perpetual technology taker in this new age of engineering biology.
A Prime Ministerial Speech on the Bioeconomy and Engineering Biology
Countries signal their policy priorities through the words of their leaders. My next hope is that in these coming three years we will see a national address from the Australian Prime Minister on the future of Australia's bioeconomy.
This speech will do what all Prime Ministerial speeches do. It'll quote economic figures. The beauty of quoting economic figures is that it requires the Prime Minister's Office to fire emails out to Treasury and Agriculture finding those numbers, and that then requires some poor graduate to trudge through the deep dark recesses of a forgotten data lake where those numbers have been languishing - if the graduate is lucky.
This speech will highlight Australia's history as an agricultural and aquacultural nation. It will anchor on the fact that Australian Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are custodians of the oldest continuing connection to land, water and biology on the planet. It will elevate the idea of Indigenous Biotechnology as a pillar of domestic and international strength for Australia. It will speak in glowing terms about the country's scientists, technologists, farmers and financiers and how the bioeconomy brings these professions together in unique ways and enables Australian economic growth based on the country's unique assets - its land, waters and biology.
But most importantly, the speech will say that “Australia can build better with biology”. It'll acknowledge that nature co-design is the centre of every nation’s approach to sustainable sovereign supply chain onshoring, but that for Australia it means something more. And then the speechwriters will get yards of cloth talking through a new vision for integrating agricultural and industry policy, and that “biopower”1 underpins Australia's national security and defence posture. A secure Australia biomanufactures it's most important goods at home.
Breaking Ground
In the next three years, I would like to see a nationally significant commercial-scale piece of biomanufacturing infrastructure break ground in Australia. Indeed, I’d be over the moon just to see the hole in the ground. This would tangibly signal environmental approvals and a secure funding profile for the build, as well as providing a visible reminder that the necessary offtake agreements were in place.
Over the last five years I’ve learnt one key lesson from synthetic biology, we build to learn. For Australia, this means that we need to take our “let’s build big autonomous machines” expertise that is typically monopolised by mining, oil and gas, and redirect this fantastic engineering know-how to biomanufacturing.
I want that 15 second clip in the news cycle showing the Minister for Industry with a golden shovel turning a sod, flanked by farmers, buildings and bankers on all sides. Because those 15 seconds would symbolise a rare achievement. This movement we call synthetic biology in Australia would culminate more than a decade of effort into a 15 second grab. The achievement of taking the most fundamental phenomena in the life sciences and rendering them into applied commercial builds across the continent. That is what I want to see.
A Fund Dedicated to BioM
My next hope is less a political one and more of a financial one, but money is its own form of power. Australia currently has a National Reconstruction Fund and biomanufacturing has been funded through it with a few grants announced last year. But I want to see an investment fund dedicated to bioM, a venture studio dedicated to scaling startups in the sector, and family foundations intentionally exposing their portfolio to bioM because they can smell the seeds of good business fundamentals and sustainable long-term innovation.
In the US there is BioMADE, a Department of Defence funded vehicle for building the engineering biology sector with a focus on the sovereign biomanufacturing of key economic inputs. In Australia there is no similar organisation, the country is completely missing a biomanufacturing vehicle for developing public-private partnerships, incentivising intellectual property collaboration across multiple fields of use, or doing base-level STEM ecosystem design in enabling ways for the advanced bioeconomy. Australia desperately needs an organisation to fill this vacancy.
I've been wanting the Australian Government to do something in this space for years, but through some long years of waiting I've simply given up on it ever happening. I have immense respect for the work of the Australian Government, I just don't think the industry profile yet exists in Australia to effectively lobby for or leverage such an entity as an Australian BioMADE. That's why we need a BioM Venture Fund. The industry needs to be built here, scaled here, designed here.
I want to see a BioM Fund with the vision to develop the premiere design and test infrastructure in deep partnership with South East Asia and the South Pacific. Australia should try to capture the most valuable segment of the full stack, design. I dream of a fund that scales out the social infrastructure for industrial biomanufacturing in this country.
A Dedicated Advisory Board to Government
My final hope is that the Australian Government will establish a dedicated advisory board of domestic experts on engineering biology. I could literally write out a long list of people who should be on this board tomorrow. I want to see an advisory board chaired by the Minister for Industry that brings together the farmers, financiers, technologists, scientists, and industrialists to cut across the interdepartmental politics that has an unseemly habit of getting in the way of good bioeconomy policy.
It's hardly biology's fault that it crosscuts every policy domain in Government.
It's time to find new pathways of potential for the future bioeconomy in Australia, but also internationally. If Australia sticks the landing on a bioeconomy policy right, it could be a generational tool of economic and cultural statecraft that resonates with the biodiverse nations in Australia's near and far neighbourhood. Countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Papua New Guinea, India, Bolivia and Mexico have extraordinary biodiversity, just like Australia. These should be Australia's natural pun intended partners in the realm of international bioeconomic trade, diplomacy, culture and influence.
Translating Hope into Action
Three years ago we lived in the shadow of Covid, now we're in risk averse times. It's never been more important for national governments to look to their own biome for economic solutions, jobs and growth. I couldn't think of a better technology for building national prosperity and security right now. Let's grow our biomass at home, let's valorise that biomass into the most advanced products on the planet, let's onshore our critical supply chains, and export sustainable growth in collaboration with our biodiverse counterparts around the world.
In short, let's build better with biology.
I have real hopes that across the next three years we'll see amazing progress around the world in national bioeconomy policies, roadmaps and economic outlooks. I just hope some of that progress also happens in Australia.
I have been slowly, ever so slowly, reading through a Biopower report put out by CNAS in the US.