“It's a place where lifestyle meets opportunity, and that's enormously attractive in advanced technologies and emerging technologies,” Chair of Invest Gold Coast, Will Hodgman, said. “But more importantly, the city is now a serious player in sovereign capability, in defence innovation, in advanced manufacturing.”
The Gold Coast has long been known for its sand, surf and warm weather, but is now starting to emerge as a national force in two quite unexpected domains: defence and aerospace, says Hodgman.
The Yatala district on the Gold Coast’s north, began as an industry precinct some 50 years ago when town planners set its land aside purely for industrial use. It now employs directly some 60,000 people and is home to a growing number of defence and aerospace companies, though start-ups are dotted all over the rest of the City as well.
The population of the Gold Coast has grown dramatically over the past 30 years so it’s not surprising that a generation of entrepreneurs has emerged. They are both technical and business specialists and very few of the companies concerned have relocated because their owners relocated to a more inviting place: “The majority of them are Gold Coast born and bred,” Deputy Mayor Mark Hammel said.
Earlier this year the City of Gold Coast council spun off its investment attraction division into a private company, Invest Gold Coast. The council “decided to establish this investment arm and separate it from the bureaucracy to make it more agile, more nimble, more responsive to emerging opportunities,” Hodgman said.
“Invest Gold Coast has [also] got funding to do Direct Investment Attraction,” Hammel pointed out.” So if you're looking to base yourself on the eastern seaboard of Australia, and every city is an option, the City of Gold Coast will put money on the table to attract you here.”
One of the best-known Gold Coast companies is Gilmour Space Technologies which was established by brothers James and Adam Gilmour. Its rocket program, which began in 2015, is set to culminate - possibly by the time this article is published - with the launch of its ERIS 1 rocket in a mission called TestFlight 1.
This is the first Australian-made rocket capable of launching satellites into orbit and will be launched from Australia’s first licensed space port, the company’s own Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland, near Abbott Point.
While ERIS launches will take place at Bowen, the design, engineering and manufacturing work is all carried out at Gilmour’s new facility at Yatala. That includes design work on the company’s HyPeRsonic FLight Test (HYPRFLT) program which will be launched later this year and aims to provide a sub-orbital, hypersonic (more than Mach 5) platform that researchers and companies can use to get flight heritage for specialist equipment in this emerging domain.
Gilmour Space Technologies is also developing its own satellite, known as ElaraSat. This 100kg bus is readying for launch no earlier than 21 June in a mission designated Multi-Mission Satellite - 1 (MMS-1) with a payload developed by CSIRO. It will be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California into a sun-synchronous Low Earth Orbit (LEO) of about 500-600km.
Nerang-based Ryan Aerospace is typical of lots of smart, high-technology Australian companies: it makes more than 90% of its sales overseas and its customers include the US Army, US Navy and US Airforce. In fact, it sells more simulators to the US military than anybody else in the world.
The company builds flight simulators that use a mix of flat panel displays and Virtual Reality (VR) or Mixed Reality (MR) goggles to simulate the environments encountered by rotary wing and, increasingly, fixed wing and fast jet pilots.
Until 2020 it was working exclusively on helicopter simulators, and was already supplying the US Army; that year it partnered with US Vertex Solutions and Precision Flight Controls partners to win a USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training simulator contract. It has since delivered simulators for both the T-6B Texan II and the supersonic T-38 Talon trainers; it also now supplies T-6B and T-45C Goshawk simulators to the US Navy as well as both F-16 simulators for the USAF and a B-52 bomber air-air refuelling simulator.
The company’s workforce is small, says Chris Ryan, its principal and founder, but has an extensive supply chain, as you’d expect. It does all of the design and integration in-house and moved from Taree in NSW to the Gold Coast in 2012, attracted by a wider, more stable supplier base, two nearby international airports and a source of skilled staff from the nearby Bond University and the massive Gold Coast campuses of Griffith and Southern Cross Universities.
Arundel-based Starbound Solutions’ AI-based agents, Virgil and Pythia, help engineering companies with their heavy compliance-related workload. In fact, one of the co-founders of Starbound, Shaun Kenyon, helped establish Gilmour’s satellite design and manufacturing operation. His co-founder and wife, Dr Sheila Gough-Kenyon, has a Ph.D in cognitive science and their Pythia and Virgil AI solutions are designed to capture and simplify all of the requirements and compliance issues in the engineering design process.
“The world doesn’t need another satellite manufacturer,” she said. “We have enough of them. What’s missing is expertise.” Virgil and Pythia are the company’s answer: as well as helping incorporate dry but necessary requirements into bid documents, they help turn tacit knowledge (for example from older engineers) into an accessible resource and hugely simplify the design and engineering process.
The engineering process is very unforgiving, especially in space, she points out: ASDEFCON holds no terrors for them as space compliance is far more complex.
Also based on the Gold Coast is the Australian arm of UK firm AutogenAI, yet another global firm that uses AI to help its customers write winning tender responses and gain defence contracts. The company’s product imparts a 70% increase in drafting speed, 85% increase in productivity and most importantly, it says, a 241% increase in the firm’s success rate. It can also increase the number of buds submitted by up to 100%. Autogen AI has customers in the transport & logistics, building & construction, and infrastructure and engineering sectors.
Specialising in Defence and para-military equipment is Craig International Ballistics of Helensvale. The company is run by James Craig, the son of its founder, and specialises in composite ballistic protection systems - body armour (including Kevlar), armour plate for aircraft, ships and vehicles and including transparent armour (or bullet-proof glass, if you prefer) for the RAN’s new Hunter-class frigates.
The company has had Defence as a customer since 2001. In 2019 it won Defence’s (and ADM’s) prestigious Essington Lewis Award for Best SME Team of the Year.
Everybody thinks they’re familiar with robots, but many don’t understand the benefits that robots can bring them. Arundel-based Mexx Engineering builds robots for defence industry customers as well as for the construction, food & beverage and mining sectors, among others.
Robots don’t get tired, they don’t mind dirty jobs and they do repeatable work faultlessly. Mexx Engineering’s manufacturing robots can weld automatically, apply identical camouflage schemes to military vehicles, drill and tap holes for subsequent assembly, move large sub-assemblies around a workspace and inspect the finished product.
Logistics is a crucial but little-mentioned aspect of Defence and the hub of Aero Defence’s nation-wide defence logistics operation is in Carrara on the Gold Coast. Every operator of aircraft, whether an air force, airline or a tiny heli-mustering organisation, needs spares, and usually needs them quickly: aircraft aren’t cheap and need to be kept flying to earn their keep.
Aero Defence has product in store and can despatch it immediately. Its customers now include both Boeing and the ADF and it carries products on behalf of Eastman, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Liebherr, Michelin, PPG Aerospace, St Gobain, Safran and Sumitomo Electric. It has 1,500m2 of inventory management infrastructure in its new warehouse, the fifth the company has occupied since it was established in Southport by brothers Trenten and Courtney Ralph in 2008.
BenchOn has helped revolutionise the creation of supply chains: it provides secure, branded ‘Workforce and Industry Portals’ for both industry and government customers which enable businesses to provide goods, services or talent to clients. This helps to maximum local business participation and also helps map out an entire industry sector, if required, to provide insights into that sector’s capabilities. BenchOn also builds a ‘Supplier Solution’ that gives companies safe and easy access to tenders and other contract opportunities that they might not otherwise know about.
Established by Tim and Kate Walmsley, BenchOn works nationally: if you want a contract with Hanwha Defense Australia in Geelong, for example, you start by going through the BenchOn portal.
Beaten Zone Venture Partners is based in Brisbane, though has key people on the Gold Coast. The company, which had its first capital call and first close in February of this year, sees no particular need to be in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra which are the traditional haunts of the Venture Capital (VC) community - it’s located in SE Queensland because its founder, Steve Baxter, and most of his workforce, are located there. That said, it has full-time team members in places like Adelaide.
Its long-term goal, says Jake Bostock who is one of Beaten Zone’s Capability Scouts, is to enhance Australia’s sovereign defence industry capabilities and create an asymmetric advantage for the ADF. It looks particularly for companies that have good prospects in the USA, either as an industry supply chain member or working directly for the US government.
The Australian domestic market, says Steve Baxter, Beaten Zone’s founder, is too small to establish thriving defence businesses, hence the focus on the US and other markets to create volume and continuity.
Private capital is increasingly a factor in Australia’s defence sector, he points out, especially as the nature of warfare undergoes rapid change. Those changes, especially the need for cheaper systems quickly and at scale, mean that industry needs private sector financial support to establish themselves.
For Steve Baxter the ultimate goal is a venture capital fund of around $60 million (“Go hard or go home!” he says); Beaten Zone Venture Partners exists to return multiples of invested capital to investors and he has a very clear-eyed view of where those returns come from.
The growing presence of home-grown companies like The Decisive Point, a communications consultancy that specialises in defence, adds to the growing defence cluster on the Gold Coast. The Decisive Point does communications, reputation management, media and communications strategy and branding, so has worked for Defence’s Project LAND400 Ph.3, for example, as well as Bell Flight on its Bell 429 helicopter program.
So, there are lots of reasons why the Gold Coast, and particularly the Yatala industrial area, is an emerging hub for defence and aerospace businesses: “We've seen a lot more national and international companies using Yatala, which now employs some 60,000 people directly, as their Queensland home base,” Hammel said.
A base at Yatala puts companies halfway between the Brisbane CBD and Surfer’s Paradise and within easy reach of the freeway to Toowoomba, out west, he pointed out. “That's not just about servicing incredibly fast-growing southeast Queensland - Yatala also enables you to put stuff on a truck and have it in Sydney overnight. So from a logistics point of view, it's in the perfect location to service half the eastern seaboard.”
Hammel would like to see an ‘incubator-style’ city emerge as startups and companies grow and move to bigger premises, with Invest Gold Coast acting as a sort of concierge and working with them on issues like zoning, the supply of broadband (Gold Coast has its own) and the supply of electricity.
The City of Gold Coast is emerging as a place where ‘Opportunity meets Lifestyle’, to misquote Hodgman, but it is also emerging as a fascinating case study in what local government can do to attract and growing a high-technology industry sector.