You can rebuild a workforce. Rebuilding industrial capability is harder.
The sale of Williamstown's historic shipyard raises a question that extends well beyond defence: what happens when Australia loses the physical capability to do something it may one day desperately need? Aviation has its own experience with that question.
I live in Williamstown, and a short walk from my house, overlooking the entrance to the Port of Melbourne, sits a shipyard that helped build some of Australia's most important naval vessels. This week, Australian Defence Magazine reported that the site is being sold.
The buyer is EMKC³, an Australian property funds management business part-owned by the Hong Kong-headquartered EMKC Group. The precise ownership structure and the buyer's intentions for the site remain unclear. The sale is also complicated by the site's planning restrictions, which require its continued use for industrial and marine engineering purposes.
What is clear is that a significant piece of Australia's industrial history is changing hands, and it raises a question that deserves more attention than the transaction itself.
How much of Australia's strategic industrial capability are we prepared to lose before we recognise what it was worth?
The capability has already disappeared. The infrastructure hasn't.
There is an important distinction to make about Williamstown. The yard has not built a large vessel since 2016. BAE Systems Australia, which acquired the site in 2008, subsequently shifted its role towards engineering and project-management support as shipbuilding activity ceased. This is not an operating shipyard about to shut its production line, that work stopped a decade ago.
But the physical site remains: the graving dock, the berths, the workshops and the industrial infrastructure assembled over generations. The yard dates to the nineteenth century and played a significant role in constructing Australia's naval fleet, including the ANZAC-class frigates and the completion of the Navy's two Canberra-class landing helicopter docks.
The site is also strategically positioned near the entrance to Australia's busiest container port.
Its future is not yet settled, and the sale does not, by itself, establish that the infrastructure will be lost or that the site will cease to serve a strategic purpose. That uncertainty is precisely the point. Once specialised industrial infrastructure is repurposed, dismantled or allowed to deteriorate beyond economic recovery, the decision becomes much harder to reverse. Planning controls may preserve an industrial use, but they cannot guarantee that the equipment, investment, technical expertise and supporting businesses needed to make that use viable will still exist.
A site can remain industrial on a planning map while losing much of the capability that once made it strategically valuable, and that is worth understanding.
Why infrastructure is a harder problem to reverse than workforce
Here's the part that should genuinely concern anyone thinking about sovereign industrial capability, aviation included.
A workforce gap, as painful and slow as it is, can eventually be rebuilt. You can train engineers. You can run recognition pathways for overseas talent, the way CASA is currently trialling. You can stand up apprenticeship pipelines, the way Alliance has done at Rockhampton in partnership with CQ University and TAFE Queensland. It takes years and real investment, but the pathways exist.
Physical infrastructure zoned, built, and equipped for a specific strategic purpose is a different problem entirely. Once a graving dock becomes an apartment foundation, or an industrial site is repurposed for something that pays better in the short term, there typically isn't a pathway back. You don't rebuild a 150-year-old heritage-listed dock or reassemble a 16-hectare strategically positioned industrial site overlooking a major port entrance, once it's gone.
Aviation has largely been lucky in this respect. The infrastructure required to maintain aircraft, the hangars, workshops and tooling are more readily rebuildable than a shipyard's specialised dockyard infrastructure.
Industrial capability is more than the people who do the work
I spent years in aviation, and one lesson from that experience is that an industry's capability is not simply a headcount. People matter enormously, and so do their qualifications, experience, judgement and practical knowledge.
But people need somewhere to work. They need equipment, tooling, facilities, approved systems, technical data, suppliers and a regulatory framework that allows the work to be performed. These elements of resource and facility work together. Remove enough of them and the remaining workforce may be highly skilled but unable to deliver the capability the country needs.
The same principle applies to shipbuilding, you cannot preserve a national shipbuilding capability simply by retaining naval architects and skilled tradespeople if the infrastructure, supply chain and industrial ecosystem required to put that expertise to work have disappeared.
Nor can you assume that the capability can be recreated quickly when demand returns.
This is where the distinction between losing activity and losing capability becomes important. A business can stop producing something while retaining the means to restart. The people may move elsewhere, but the facilities, equipment, intellectual property and supplier relationships may remain. Lose those foundations as well, and restarting becomes an entirely different proposition. You are no longer restarting production, you are rebuilding an industry.
Aviation has already paid to rebuild capability
Australian aviation offers a useful comparison, although the industries are not identical.
For years, operators have had to make difficult decisions about where aircraft maintenance is performed, how much capacity is retained domestically and how much work is sent offshore. There are legitimate commercial reasons for using overseas maintenance providers. Labour costs, scale, specialist capability, fleet size and utilisation all influence those decisions.
Sending work offshore is not automatically a strategic mistake, but there is a longer-term consideration that can be easy to overlook in a commercial assessment: what happens to domestic capability when sufficient work leaves the country to make maintaining it uneconomic?
Engineering experience becomes harder to retain. Apprenticeship pathways weaken, specialist tooling and facilities become harder to justify, and suppliers lose volume. Eventually, bringing the work back may require a substantial investment in both people and infrastructure.
Australia has seen efforts to rebuild domestic maintenance capability, including Alliance Airlines' investment in its Rockhampton maintenance facility and workforce development.
That is a positive development, and it demonstrates that capability can be rebuilt when an operator is prepared to invest in the facilities, people and training required. But it also illustrates the cost and effort involved in bringing capability back.
The comparison with Williamstown does have limits. Aircraft maintenance facilities and specialised naval shipyards have different physical requirements, investment profiles and strategic roles. An aircraft hangar is not a graving dock, and the economics of reopening either facility are different. I believe the underlying question, however, is the same.
When a capability disappears, what will it cost to get it back, and will the infrastructure needed to support it still be available?
In aviation, we can point to examples of capability being rebuilt. In shipbuilding, losing a specialised site may make that task considerably harder, depending on what happens to the infrastructure and what alternative facilities are available. That is not an argument for preserving every facility indefinitely. It is an argument for understanding the consequences before the options narrow.
The commercial decision and the national interest are not always the same
Here is where the discussion becomes more uncomfortable. A private company is entitled to make commercial decisions about assets it owns, subject to the laws, contracts and regulatory requirements that apply. An industrial site that no longer supports its original business purpose still has costs attached to it, and there may be sound commercial reasons to sell.
Nor is foreign investment inherently a problem. Australia benefits from international capital, expertise and investment across many industries, including aviation. The nationality of a buyer does not, on its own, establish that a transaction threatens national security or strategic capability. The more important question is whether the public interest is adequately protected when assets with potential strategic value change ownership or use.
Commercial owners make decisions based on commercial realities. Governments, meanwhile, are responsible for assessing broader national requirements, and those responsibilities do not always align neatly. If a facility is commercially unattractive but strategically valuable, who is responsible for bridging the gap?
Should government pay to preserve infrastructure that industry cannot justify maintaining? Should Defence identify and secure access to alternative facilities? Should planning and ownership arrangements provide additional safeguards for assets considered strategically important?
These are policy questions, not accusations against a particular buyer, and they need to be answered before a crisis makes them urgent.
The question Australia should be asking
I do not know what EMKC³ ultimately intends to do with the Williamstown site. The available reporting does not establish that the site will lose its industrial function, and it would be premature to assume otherwise. But the sale provides an opportunity to ask a broader question to consider.
Before Australia loses another piece of specialised industrial infrastructure, have we properly assessed what it contributes, what alternatives exist and what it would cost to replace?
That assessment should consider more than the value of the land or the number of people currently employed there. It should examine the capability the site enables, the supporting industrial ecosystem, the time required to recreate it and the consequences if it is unavailable when needed.
Those questions apply to defence shipbuilding, but they also apply to aviation maintenance, specialist manufacturing and other industries where physical infrastructure and accumulated expertise combine to create capabilities that cannot be recreated overnight.
From my perspective in aviation, the lesson is straightforward. We can train more engineers, we can rebuild apprenticeship pipelines, and we can invest in new facilities and bring work back onshore. But rebuilding takes time, money and sustained commitment. And if the physical foundations of an industry have disappeared, money alone may not be enough to restore what was lost.
The real cost of losing industrial capability is not always visible when the decision is made. It becomes visible later, when the capability is needed and the option to recover it no longer exists.
Williamstown may yet find a productive future that retains meaningful industrial value, and I hope it does. But whatever happens to the site, Australia should not wait for the next disruption to discover which parts of its industrial capability it can no longer afford to lose.
Jotore Aviation Consulting provides maintenance strategy, regulatory compliance, and CAMO/AMO advisory services to Australian aviation operators. For more aviation industry analysis, visit www.jotoreaviation.au
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