Grant Swart, Vice President & General Manager Australia at Mayne Pharma

All right, well, let's talk more about your career.

So you've got an extensive career leading in transforming large organisations.

What were your initial impressions of the local Adelaide economy here? And do you think there's room to grow and expand Adelaide's pharmaceutical and manufacturing sectors?

Well, absolutely, definitely.

Yeah.

But there are a few problems.

So I think South Australia is doing very well economically, and Salisbury is definitely doing very well

economically.

But most of the money and their focus goes on to defense or tech, and everything else pretty much gets forgotten about.

I mean, which is a problem because there's only so many places that can be there.

Interestingly, Adelaide has a very, very robust biotech industry going, a medical going.

Mm-hmm.

But the problem is all the development work gets done here, then it moves offshore very quickly.

So it doesn't stay here.

So all the think tanks are here and all the smart people are here, but when it grows, it doesn't stay, it leaves.

Capitalizing.

Which is a big problem.

Yeah.

I mean, Australian manufacturing, I think is two thirds, dropped by two thirds in the last 50 years.

And obviously Adelaide's had a fair share of that.

We have a whole bunch of people that used to work for Holden.

Around the corner for us, there's a Coca-Cola bottling plant that's closed.

So it's...

I think Adelaide is representative of the whole country and everything should be very good, but it isn't.

Yeah.