QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (15:09): We're taking note of all answers given to coalition senators this afternoon, but there was one answer that stood out to me as a South Australian. It was the answer given by Minister Wong about the closure of the Whyalla blast furnace which was recently confirmed by the administrators of the plant. They confirmed that it will never be relit now, which is a surprise to almost nobody but a tragedy for the 500 workers who are going to be made redundant.
They're expected to be victims of this closure, and it's my contention therefore that they are also victims of Labor's relentless ideological pursuit of the climate scam, as it is now known and as it is now openly referred to. The so-called decarbonisation of this country makes it near impossible to do any sort of manufacturing and therefore provide jobs for Australians.
It certainly makes it impossible to keep a blast furnace competitive by price. We were talking this morning about what sort of prospect you'd have of building this very building we're in today when a result of the climate scam is that we don't even make flat glass in this country anymore, let alone any of the other products that would have gone into it. That's the Australia we live in now.
All the while, our international competitors blast ahead, so to speak. You don't think you're going to see the same excuses the government are using for this closure—'old equipment', 'hole in the ozone layer', 'my dog did it'. Whatever the excuses are, you don't see them coming out of the People's Republic of China; they're just carrying on.
And what have they got? They've got cheap energy. Once again, Labor prioritises their positioning in amongst the global elite and in amongst the global climate glitterati higher than they do Australian jobs.
It doesn't sound very much to me like the words that we heard coming out of the great premier from South Australia, the exalted man that can do no wrong in the eyes of the Adelaide Advertiser! By the way, the Adelaide Advertiser gets a lot of kickbacks from the state government in South Australia. It's totally unrelated, but I thought I'd throw it in there, just as we're here!
The words 'green energy superpower', 'green energy superpower', 'green energy superpower'—it doesn't sound much like a green energy superpower out in Whyalla anymore. The other one who stood up this week was the great—what do they call him?—minister for climate or the minister for the environment, Minister Bowen, who is the gift that keeps on giving. My advice, though I hate to give advice to the Australian Labor Party, is to keep rolling that guy out, particularly on social media, where he has almost a world record now in ratios.
For people who don't know what a ratio is, it's when you put up a comment and you then get smashed by the comments coming back at you. He is a world leader in that respect. But he also—what did he say?
He said he 'never bought into the hype'. It's unimaginable. To say those words—they're right here.
It must have been 15 times that he bought into the hype or at least proclaimed to. On 13 April 2023—it's a long time ago, by the way, so maybe his memory is not quite there—the minister said: Today's release of the annual State of Hydrogen report reinforces that Australia has the foundations to become a global leader in green hydrogen. On 23 May of the same year, he said: Now some people might think, oh, you know, is green hydrogen real, is it going to happen?
Well, it's already being manufactured right there in Gladstone … I'm going to run out of time, but there are so many more. There are millions of them! Unbelievable!
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