In 1947, that fun-loving bunch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, unveiled a concept called the Doomsday Clock, an attempt to measure how close humanity is to “a human-made global catastrophe.” Steven Camilleri, the CTO and co-founder of Australia’s SPEE3D, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of cold-spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) systems, is proposing that his home country adopt something not unlike the Doomsday Clock, but specifically tailored to a context of industrial resilience.
This isn’t in his capacity as an advanced manufacturing executive, but rather follows from Camilleri’s work starting Make Stuff Here, a blueprint for Australian industrial autonomy that I covered last year when it was still in its early phases. Now, Camilleri has fleshed out the concept systematically in a paper for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), titled “Make stuff here…or else: A framework for deciding what Australia must produce, repair or regenerate domestically.”
You can, and should, download the full report here. The core recommendation that it revolves around is the brilliant idea that the Australian government should formulate a ‘National Resilience Test’ used to arrive at a ‘Sovereignty Countdown’ for critical infrastructure and supplies: the amount of time that the nation would be able to provide the relevant goods and services for itself during a major supply disruption.
Obviously, this would require extensive cooperation between the public and private sectors, as Camilleri also proposes, along with a handful of other major recommendations necessary for implementing the overall framework, such as industrial policy support for workforce development. Notably, Camilleri does not suggest his plan as a replacement or alternative to existing policies and programs that Australia has been implementing in recent years, but argues for its alignment with, and complementarity to, the various tracks that the nation has already introduced as economic resilience measures.
“This report argues that national resilience is not an abstract policy ambition but a measurable engineering problem,” Camilleri writes. “At its core is the concept of the Sovereignty Countdown: the time a critical system can continue operating if external supply is disrupted. Every essential function—water, energy, fuel, food logistics, communications—operates within this constraint. When the countdown expires, continuity depends on external actors, and sovereignty narrows in practical terms.
Australia currently operates within a dangerous lag. Policy has pivoted towards resilience, but physical capability hasn’t yet caught up. Decades of rational, efficiency-driven decisions have hollowed out the domestic production layer—the industrial ecosystem that repairs, replenishes and sustains national systems. In its place, Australia relies heavily on storage and logistics. Those ext
In 1947, that fun-loving bunch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, unveiled a concept called the Doomsday Clock, an attempt to measure how close humanity is to “a human-made global catastrophe.” Steven Camilleri, the CTO and co-founder of Australia’s SPEE3D, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of cold-spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) systems, is proposing that his home country adopt something not unlike the Doomsday Clock, but specifically tailored to a context of industrial resilience.
This isn’t in his capacity as an advanced manufacturing executive, but rather follows from Camilleri’s work starting Make Stuff Here, a blueprint for Australian industrial autonomy that I covered last year when it was still in its early phases. Now, Camilleri has fleshed out the concept systematically in a paper for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), titled “Make stuff here…or else: A framework for deciding what Australia must produce, repair or regenerate domestically.”
You can, and should, download the full report here. The core recommendation that it revolves around is the brilliant idea that the Australian government should formulate a ‘National Resilience Test’ used to arrive at a ‘Sovereignty Countdown’ for critical infrastructure and supplies: the amount of time that the nation would be able to provide the relevant goods and services for itself during a major supply disruption.
Obviously, this would require extensive cooperation between the public and private sectors, as Camilleri also proposes, along with a handful of other major recommendations necessary for implementing the overall framework, such as industrial policy support for workforce development. Notably, Camilleri does not suggest his plan as a replacement or alternative to existing policies and programs that Australia has been implementing in recent years, but argues for its alignment with, and complementarity to, the various tracks that the nation has already introduced as economic resilience measures.
“This report argues that national resilience is not an abstract policy ambition but a measurable engineering problem,” Camilleri writes. “At its core is the concept of the Sovereignty Countdown: the time a critical system can continue operating if external supply is disrupted. Every essential function—water, energy, fuel, food logistics, communications—operates within this constraint. When the countdown expires, continuity depends on external actors, and sovereignty narrows in practical terms.
Australia currently operates within a dangerous lag. Policy has pivoted towards resilience, but physical capability hasn’t yet caught up. Decades of rational, efficiency-driven decisions have hollowed out the domestic production layer—the industrial ecosystem that repairs, replenishes and sustains national systems. In its place, Australia relies heavily on storage and logistics. Those ext