When he was in Japan recently Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised $35 million of taxpayers’ money to subsidise Australian car production by the multinational giant Toyota.

Behind the subsidy is the Labor’s Party’s romantic view that there is something special about a national motor vehicle industry, a sector where real workers make real industrial products.

As we know, the motor vehicle industry is located largely in Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide. Sydney was once a major motor vehicle producer with assembly lines at Pagewood (Holden), Homebush (Ford) and Zetland (Leyland). These were victims of Australia’s dramatic industrial restructuring during the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet Sydney remains a major Australian manufacturing city. Western Sydney, in particular, can lay claim to being Australia’s largest manufacturing region.

In 2006, western Sydney contained 99,267 manufacturing jobs while Sydney as a whole hosted 173,876 manufacturing jobs.

Importantly, manufacturing industry is western Sydney’s largest employment sector.

Certainly the Sydney economy has boomed over the past three decades on the back of spectacular growth in the professional and business services sectors.

But we should be careful of writing obituaries for manufacturing in this city.

The two biggest manufacturing sub-sectors in western Sydney are machinery and equipment manufacturing, and food products.

Machinery and equipment are made predominantly in the older industrial suburbs around Auburn, Bankstown and Parramatta.

Food manufacturing, though, is dispersed across western Sydney with major new concentrations in the Blacktown and Liverpool areas. Food manufacturing is a growth sub-sector.

Food manufacturing in western Sydney not only includes the large food companies like Bartter (poultry), Goodman Fielder (bread, flour and vegetable oil products) and Unilever (oils, teas and ice creams). It also includes a growing number of small and medium-sized enterprises with exciting specialisations to support Sydney’s wonderfully diverse food cultures.

Unlike car makers, though, Sydney’s manufacturers don’t attract big headlines. Largely they are off the political radar. Yet their continued survival depends on government support for manufacturing-related skills training, decent transport infrastructure, access to high speed broadband communications, and reliable water, gas and electricity supplies.

I wonder when our Prime Minister will come to western Sydney to announce funding for these things, to support the manufacturers in Australia’s most dynamic manufacturing region?

*Phillip O'Neill is Professor and Director of the Urban Research Centre for the University of Western Sydney. He regularly comments on matters affecting Sydney.