NFF CEO Michael Guerin at the Wool Industry Summit yesterday.

Thank you, and good afternoon everyone.

I understand that Bryan (Bryan Fry, Australian Wool Innovation CEO) and I have been paired together today because we are both regarded as relative outsiders to the wool industry — brought in, as it was explained to me, to offer some outside perspective.

I need to declare a minor defect in the premise; I was raised on a sheep and beef property in New Zealand. Wool was part of the rhythm of life. I have subsequently worked around wool and fibre in a few roles, including internationally. So I understand something of the pride, skill and emotional attachment that sits behind this industry – as well as the frustration when its commercial fortunes fail to reflect the quality of what it produces.

Perhaps you could describe me as a returning expatriate. Or, given where I was born, an infiltrator.

Either way, I understand what the organisers are trying to achieve and welcome the chance to be a part of it.

What talent looks for

Industries can spend a great deal of time talking to themselves. We develop our own language, revisit familiar debates and sometimes mistake the intensity of our internal conversation for progress in the outside world.

Bringing in people with different experience can be useful — not because outsiders necessarily know more, but because they notice things insiders may no longer see.

The question I have been given is: How can wool win the competition for talent among agricultural industries?

My short answer is this: Wool can win — but only if it stops treating talent primarily as a workforce problem and starts treating it as a competition for imagination, belonging and purpose.

Because people rarely choose an industry simply because the industry has vacancies. When I look at wool, I see an industry with an extraordinary proposition.

 It begins on farms across rural Australia.

 It involves animals, landscapes, genetics, nutrition, animal health and husbandry.

 It draws on science, technology, data, engineering and advanced manufacturing.

 It travels through a complex international supply chain.

 It connects Australian producers with processors, designers, global brands and consumers.

 It sits at the intersection of some of the defining questions of our time: how we produce sustainably, how we care for animals and landscapes, how we replace disposable materials, how we build resilient regional economies, and how we create products that are both useful and beautiful.

 You can start in a shearing shed in western New South Wales and end up working with researchers in Australia, processors in China, manufacturers in Italy, designers in Paris and consumers almost anywhere in the world.

That is not a dull industry, rather it is an extraordinary career story. Too often, we describe the industry through its structures rather than its possibilities.

We tell people about organisations, programs, committees, levies and consultation processes. All necessary. All deeply interesting to the people responsible for them. Possibly less electrifying to a 22-year-old deciding whether to join us.

Young people do not wake up thinking: “I hope today I discover a mature representative structure with several opportunities for stakeholder consultation.”

They ask different questions.

 Will I do work that matters?

 Will I keep learning?

 Will I be trusted with responsibility?

 Will I meet interesting people?

 Can I build a good life?

 Can I make a difference?

 And — although we occasionally avoid saying this in agriculture — can I earn a decent living and see a future for myself?

The industries which compete most successfully for talent answer those questions clearly.

 They present a sense of momentum.

 They show the problems they are trying to solve.

 They make their technology visible.

 They introduce prospective recruits to people with whom they can identify.

 They offer genuine responsibility early.

 They make entry pathways easy to find and easy to understand.

 They do not merely advertise a job.

 They invite people into a mission.

Wool already has most of the ingredients required to do that. But having the ingredients and presenting the proposition are not the same thing.

Approaching the question from three directions

So let me approach the question from three directions: what another industry does well, how wool compares and what wool might need to do differently.

What another industry does well – Formula 1.

Most of us see drivers, cars and extraordinarily expensive ways of moving very quickly in a circle.

But Formula 1 presents itself to young people as much more than a sport. It is engineering, materials science, software, data, logistics, broadcasting, marketing and high-performance teamwork.

Through its international schools’ program, young people do not simply receive a brochure about careers in motorsport. They form teams, design and manufacture miniature racing cars, raise sponsorship, manage budgets and compete.

They experience the work before being asked to choose the career. The program now operates in 65 countries and reaches more than 29,000 schools a year.

Formula 1 does not say, “We have a shortage of engineers.”

It says, “Come and help us solve difficult problems, push the boundaries of technology and compete on a global stage.”

Wool has every bit as much complexity, science, technology and international reach.

Wool already has school programs, competitions, scholarships, graduate opportunities and emerging leader initiatives. The question to me is whether they feel like isolated activities – or one visible journey from curiosity to participation to career.

How does wool stack up

So how does wool stack up against other agricultural industries?

My assessment is that wool has one of the strongest underlying stories in Australian agriculture — but it does not always tell that story with the confidence, clarity or the unity it deserves.

Some industries have become very good at projecting innovation.

 Cotton talks about science, water efficiency, data, technology and continuous improvement.

 Grains talks about scale, machinery, robotics, genetics and global food security.

 Horticulture presents growth, diversity, premium products and sophisticated supply chains.

 Beef connects itself to landscape management, food production, regional identity and international markets.

Wool has all of those dimensions — and then adds fashion, fibre science, performance textiles, provenance and one of the most recognised ingredient brands in the world. There should be no reason for wool to come second in the contest for talented people.

But there are several things we need to confront.

Firstly – profitability.

Talent is attracted by purpose, but it is retained by opportunity.

Young people are perceptive. They can distinguish between an industry celebrating its heritage and one investing confidently in its future.

If producers are leaving wool, if career pathways are insecure or if businesses cannot afford to train and retain people, no communications campaign will disguise that reality.

A compelling talent strategy therefore cannot sit apart from the industry’s commercial strategy.

Profitability is workforce policy.

Productivity is workforce policy.

Market confidence is workforce policy.

When an industry is profitable, people see investment, ambition, mobility and opportunity. When it is not, they see caution, contraction and a career risk.

Second – fragmentation.

People looking in from outside do not neatly distinguish between every wool organisation, function and historical boundary.

They see “the wool industry”. And they make judgements about the industry from the collective behaviour they observe.

If the dominant public story is disagreement, institutional conflict or argument about who speaks for whom, that affects more than reputation. It affects recruitment. Talented people want to be part of serious organisations tackling important problems. They do not generally aspire to inherit yesterday’s disputes.

That does not mean suppressing disagreement. Healthy industries debate difficult issues. But there is a difference between a productive contest of ideas and allowing institutional disagreement to become the industry’s public personality.

The competition for talent gives wool another reason to develop a clearer shared story:

This is who we are.

This is where we are going.

These are the problems we intend to solve.

And there is a place for you in helping us do it.

Third – how we engage young people once they arrive.

Every industry says it wants young people involved.

What young people sometimes hear is:

“We would love your fresh thinking — as soon as you have spent 20 years agreeing with ours.”

There is little value in bringing emerging leaders into the room if all the decisions have already been made, the acceptable answers have already been defined, and their role is largely decorative.

Engagement is not creating a youth committee over to one side. It is sharing influence. It is giving people significant work. It is putting them on real projects, exposing them to boards and senior leaders, investing in their development and allowing them to challenge assumptions without being treated as naïve.

Young people do not need to be endlessly told that they are the leaders of tomorrow. They need opportunities to lead something today.

Wool already has good foundations. There are graduate programs, leadership initiatives, education resources, scholarships, competitions, ambassadors, training and international opportunities. But from outside, these can look like separate programs rather than parts of a coherent pathway.

One visible front door

Imagine if the industry could present one visible front door. A place where someone — whether raised on a wool property in New Zealand, in an Australian regional town, or in an apartment in Melbourne — could see the entire range of wool careers:

On-farm production.

Shearing and wool handling.

Veterinary science and genetics.

Data and technology.

Environmental science and natural capital.

Economics and market analysis.

Processing and manufacturing.

Trade and logistics.

Marketing, communications, design and fashion.

Research, policy and advocacy.

And imagine if that person could see not only a list of occupations, but actual people doing them. People their own age. Women and men. People from farms and people from cities. People who entered through university, vocational training, family businesses, apprenticeships or entirely unrelated careers.

We need to show that wool is not a closed community into which you must be born. It is a consequential global industry which you can choose to join. That may require us to reconsider some of our existing programs.

If eligibility requires applicants to already have a background in, or connection with, wool, we may be selecting from the people who have already found us. That is valuable — but it is not quite the same as competing for new talent.

If we genuinely want outside perspectives, we need entry points designed for outsiders. One of the great, untapped pools for Australian agriculture is people who have never imagined that they belong in it.

City-based engineers, designers, software developers, scientists, communicators and entrepreneurs may have skills wool badly needs. But they will not apply for careers they cannot see.  And they will not join an industry whose language suggests they need several generations of inherited knowledge merely to enter the conversation.

Fourth – let wool’s young people tell wool’s story.

This industry does not lack impressive emerging leaders. It sometimes lacks the discipline to put them at the centre of its communications.

Polished corporate material has a place. But one young shearer explaining why they love the physical and mental challenge of their work may do more to recruit another young person than 40 pages of workforce strategy.

A graduate describing the journey from an Australian farm to mills, manufacturers and designers across the world makes the global supply chain real.

A young producer showing how genetics, electronic identification, data, pasture management and animal health come together challenges the lingering stereotype that agriculture is low-tech or backward-looking.

Authenticity travels further than institutional language. We should equip these people, trust them and give them the platforms. Not ask them to recite an approved industry message, but allow them to speak honestly about what they love, what frustrates them and what they want to change. That honesty is not a risk. It is what makes them credible.

Fifth – culture.

Recruitment brings people through the door. Culture determines whether they stay.

The industries that retain talent offer more than employment. They provide mentoring, mobility, professional development, networks, recognition and a sense of community. They also accept that contemporary careers are rarely linear.

Someone may work on-farm, move into finance, spend time in policy, go overseas, enter a technology business and later return to production. That should not be treated as leaving the industry. That is how industry capability grows.

Wool’s global and highly connected supply chain gives it an unusual opportunity to create careers across businesses, organisations, disciplines and countries. We should make that mobility a feature of the proposition.

Join wool and you are not choosing one job for life. You are entering an ecosystem in which you can build a lifetime of different careers.

Finally, wool must communicate optimism — but it must be credible optimism.

There is a temptation in speeches like this to say that the future has never been brighter.

People in this room understand the pressures facing woolgrowers: costs, market volatility, seasonal conditions, workforce constraints, competition from other enterprises and difficult public debates.

There is no value in pretending those challenges do not exist. In fact, they may be part of the invitation. The best people are not necessarily looking for an industry with no problems. They are looking for important problems worth solving.

Wool has plenty of those.

 How do we improve productivity and grower returns?

 How do we strengthen demand and diversify markets?

 How do we demonstrate wool’s environmental credentials rigorously and confidently?

 How do we respond to community expectations on animal welfare while ensuring practical, science-based outcomes?

 How do we use genetics, data and technology to transform production?

 How do we rebuild domestic capability and strengthen our position in global value chains?

 How do we unite a diverse industry around a shared ambition?

These are not reasons talented people will avoid wool. Properly presented, they are reasons talented people will choose it.

Why competition for talent matters

There is another reason why this competition for talent matters. In 2024, the world produced about 132 million tonnes of fibre. Around 78 million tonnes of it was polyester. Around one million tonnes was wool.

Think about that: for every tonne of wool produced globally, the world produced something like 78 tonnes of polyester.

And polyester production grew by around seven million tonnes in just one year — roughly seven times the entire annual production of clean wool.

Wool now represents less than 1 percent of the global fibre market. Around 1970, it was closer to 8pc.

But here is the important point. The world has not stopped demanding fibre. Global fibre production has more than doubled since 2000 and is forecast to keep growing strongly.

We have not lost because there is no market. We have lost share because the world no longer needs fibre. It has lost share in a rapidly expanding market — and most of that growth has been captured by products derived from fossil carbon.

That should concern us. But it should also galvanise us. Because if wool is to win back even a small part of that enormous market, we will need exceptional people: producers, scientists, geneticists, designers, marketers, manufacturers, technologists and advocates.

The competition for talent is not a side issue for wool. It is part of the competition for wool’s future.

Five practical propositions

So if I were to reduce all of this to five practical propositions, they would be these.

First, build one compelling industry-wide talent story — not another individual organisational campaign.

Second, create a visible front door showing the full range of careers and the pathways into them.

Third, deliberately recruit beyond the traditional wool community.

Fourth, give young people genuine influence, responsibility and a platform — not simply a seat in the audience.

And fifth, ensure that the experience people have inside wool lives up to the promise that attracted them.

Wool has something many industries would envy.

 It has history—but it does not have to be trapped by history.

 It has tradition—but also immense capacity for innovation.

 It is grounded in regional Australia—but connected to the world.

 It produces something ancient and natural that is also technically advanced and extraordinarily relevant to the future.

 And it has people whose knowledge, skill and commitment are every bit as remarkable as the fibre itself.

The task is not to invent a more attractive industry. The task is to reveal the industry that is already here—while being honest enough to change those parts of it that do not yet match our ambitions.

How wool will win

Wool will win the competition for talent when people looking in can see three things clearly:

Work that matters. A future with momentum. And a place where they can belong and make a difference.

If we can offer that — and live up to it — the talent will come.

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your conversation today.