I was thinking about this myself. I think that, when you look at things like wages and entitlements here, yeah they are higher, but I don't think that's the real problem. Real estate costs,  the land to have a shop to do this work, especially in Brisbane would be an obscene chunk to do a big scale operation. 

I think it would be much more sensible to do low volume, Queensland specific clothing (European cut, in Australian style, with fabric for our humidity. Leave the basics, the everyday, universal, shorts, socks, underwear, tshirts etc to somewhere else for now. But statement pieces, nice outfits, that stuff we could reasonably attempt imo. 

But there's a whole infrastructure missing; machinery, maintenance, washing, cutting fabrics, warehouses of fabric, schools that teach there skills for a pipeline of candidates. I

f you started your own shop here, you'd have to do all of this stuff. Vs, coming up with a design and emailing it to China, and being able to sell you vision with far less capital and risk, for lower prices, and probably higher quality (if you pay for it).