With federal government funding through a mix of grants and loans, Med-Con will double its workforce immediately, bring a third machine out of storage, and consider manufacturing three new machines.

The government has asked for as many masks as Med-Con can make, and has said it will underwrite extra costs to allow the company to continue to sell them at the normal price of around $76 to $80 per 300 masks. The federal government has also said it will buy 10 million masks a year from 2021. The Victorian government has also put in an order for 1 million masks.

“Now the only limit is getting enough people to run the machines and getting enough supplies. Once we sort that we’ll be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Mr Csiszar said. Currently, 12 ADF soldiers are filling in until enough local employees can be recruited.

Med-Con’s masks require five different types of non-woven fabric, all serving slightly different functions. Supplies come from the US, Turkey, Taiwan, Germany and China.

Supply problems

He said some countries, particularly China, had been reticent to supply at the moment, but the federal government had used some of its diplomatic clout to help secure the necessary supplies.

“We’ve put in orders to cover enough production for 18 months. The question now is getting that material out of the countries,” he said.

“We’ve got two orders from the United States of 10 40-foot containers. The first will be coming by air. We’ve also got 40-foot containers from Turkey. I believe the US one is in the air now, and one from Turkey is in the process of being dispatched by air.” Normally supplies are shipped, “but desperate times call for desperate measures”.


The federal government is also working with local non-woven fabric manufacturer Textor Technologies. Textor normally makes non-wovens for consumer goods such as nappies, sanitary pads and baby wipes. But it is now working with the CSIRO to switch production to non-wovens for face masks, potentially using wool.

But Textor director Andy Butler said it was a "tricky" exercise repurposing its machines to manufacture these complex types of non-woven materials.

"Supply is difficult globally which is why we are looking at Aussie ingenuity. They may not be pretty but may be functional," Industry Minister Karen Andrews told the The Australian Financial Review.

"We had a pretty good idea what Australian manufacturing capacity was but we needed to find manufacturing businesses that could diversify and make essential goods."

The government had established a taskforce to marshal the effort to produce personal protective equipment, with sub-committees for specific products such as surgical gowns or gloves. In addition to ventilators, Ms Andrews said the priority was to produce masks and test swabs.

Australia is effectively being held hostage over face marks, because of the reliance on imported products, most notably China, although Ms Andrews said there were adequate supplies for now.

"We are continuing to buy face masks from overseas. But a lot of things are getting stopped at containers," she said.


Ms Andrews said there would be opportunities for manufacturing to absorb some of the hundreds of thousands of displaced workers but cautioned it wouldn't be a panacea.

"Is there going to be a job for everybody? Sadly there won't be," she said. Ms Andrews said the government had begun work last year on establishing what manufacturing had strategic importance to Australia and should be done here. She said coronavirus had brought that need sharply into focus.

Running at 120 per cent

Whiteley Corporation's executive chairman Dr Greg Whiteley said an extra shift had been added each day at his factory and staff were now working Saturdays to meet demand from hospitals battling the coronavirus.

“We are going at 120 per cent of what we previously thought was full capacity and we are still well behind on orders,” he said.

“We can’t just hire extra contractors to fill orders, as all our staff need a long induction into the business and its processes.”

Dr Whiteley said while it had never been busier there was an emerging supply shortage of ethanol, a key ingredient for sanitisers and disinfectants.

He said the price had increased more than fourfold on the back of a spike in consumer demand for hand sanitisers.


“We have only got two days worth of ethanol supply,” he said. "At the moment I’m scrambling to secure supply from anyone who will take a phone call.”

Dr Whiteley said the looming ethanol shortage meant hospitals may struggle to disinfect intensive care units and operating theatres, while staff may run low on medical-grade hand sanitisers, as supplies had been snapped up by households.

“This is the problem when you don’t look after your local manufacturing base …. when there’s a crisis you quickly run out of critical supplies,” he said.

Dr Whiteley said the government needed to set aside a portion of local ethanol production for the medical sector ahead of a forecast peak in coronavirus cases, which is likely to put unprecedented strain on the hospital system.

Respiratory device medtech company ResMed has redeployed its 7500-strong workforce globally to focus on responding to the COVID-19 crisis.

The company, which is known for its sleep apnoea devices, also makes ventilators and breathing masks (including hospital masks) and issued a statement on Tuesday saying its primary focus was on maximising the availability of ResMed’s respiratory support products for the growing number of coronavirus patients globally.

Chief executive Mick Farrell said the company was taking every measure across the 140 countries it operates in to maximise the production of its products.


“We are looking to double or triple the output of ventilators, and scale-up ventilation mask production more than tenfold,” he said.

To give an idea of the scale of the manufacturing challenge, Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government was hoping local producers could add 5000 ventilators and respirators to cope with the expected surge in admissions.

Putting that in context, Australia has a standing capacity of 2000 ventilators in intensive care units and is looking to double that using stock already available and repurposing other machines such as sleep apnoea machines, ventilators used by anesthetists and even those used by veterinarians.

A bottle of the Archie Rose hand sanitiser. AAP

Archie Rose, a Sydney-based gin and whisky distillery, is turning to hand sanitiser production. Following World Health Organisation guidelines, the sanitiser has 65 per cent alcohol by volume and uses a range of botanicals usually found in the company's gin, including cassia, grapefruit and cardamom. The first run of 4500 500mL bottles sold out in an hour online and will be shipped from tomorrow. Staff are now frantically trying to source more bottles so a second production run can begin.

“We as a business and team, along with the retail and hospitality industries, and all Australians, are facing incredibly difficult times," said Archie Rose founder Will Edwards. "But with the required federal licences, dangerous goods approvals, access to raw materials, and expertise, we are in a unique position to manufacture this essential product."

The move will also help redeploy Archie Rose's bar staff, left without work after the government's shutdown of bars and restaurants. Edwards said many stood down employees will now be employed to fill, package and ship the bottles.

“I’m incredibly proud of our team for having turned around this product from concept to launch in under 10 days," he says, "and we will continue to produce sanitiser for as long as we can, or as long as is required."


Overseas, luxury goods group LVMH transformed its cosmetics factories into hand sanitiser and face mask producers, while Prada, which is independently owned, was funding two intensive care and resuscitation units in three of Milan’s biggest hospitals, including one children’s hospital.

Advisory firm EY has set up a special unit to advise businesses on whether they have the right infrastructure and capabilities to rapidly repurpose.

Jenelle McMaster, EY Oceania markets leader, said businesses needed to strike deals with customers quickly and not wait around for some form of tender process.

No time to waste

"We are seeing a number of clients do this – rapidly activating business-to-business agreements to funnel workers with certain skills to high demand in other sectors, manufacturers repurpose factories, landlords repurpose as triage or treatment facilities,'' she said.

She said businesses needed to look closely at what their assets were and make a fast assessment of whether it could be pulled off.

“There is a critical networking aspect to this – these things are not going to go out to tender. To pull off a rapid pivot, managers and leaders will need to be connecting cross-sector with a high degree of trust. In some cases, these things are happening without all the commercials nailed down contractually upfront.

“We’re seeing clients so focused on managing the crisis at hand that they need to be careful not to miss the opportunities to generate supplementary incomes by repurposing their assets.”

Ms McMaster said overseas there had been a big shift in the last two days in the US as the apparel industry moved to make face masks and hospital gowns. They are also in contact with adjacent manufacturing industries to make hospital beds.