QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator BLYTH (South Australia) (15:17): The irony coming from those on the other side of this chamber! It is devastating what the closure of the blast furnace means for the people of Whyalla. As a proud South Australian, it is something that you never, ever want to see.
This is after $2.4 billion of taxpayer money was invested to keep this blast furnace going and to keep the ability to make steel a sovereign capability here in Australia. The irony is not lost on me. We live in a country that has bountiful resources.
We have more iron ore than we could possibly ever, ever need, we have gas, and we have coal. What we don't have in this country is cheap, reliable power that makes us able to manufacture things like steel at an affordable rate. You want to talk about why the investment wasn't made into the old technology of the blast furnace?
That's because companies, the steelworks, were too busy paying high electricity prices. Because of the high energy prices, it was no longer economical to be able to make steel and to be able to invest in the technology that they needed to keep the steelworks going well into the future. The politics and ideology from this Labor government has meant that the only steelworks we have left in South Australia is now shut.
What does that mean for Australia? What does that mean for our sovereign capability? What does that mean for the township of Whyalla?
Overnight 600 people lost their jobs in a country town with no prospect of anything to replace it. I think of some of the job offers that the Labor premier in South Australia was talking about yesterday. They were talking about between 10 and 15 jobs.
Well, that's going to be really great for the 585 people that aren't going to be lucky enough to get one of those very few jobs. This is an absolute disgrace and a failure in policy from this Labor government not just at a federal level but at a state level too. We want to talk about this green hydrogen fantasy and how green hydrogen was going to mean we could make green steel in Australia.
That fantasy has sent us down a path of not being able to make steel at all. What is this going to mean for things like Osborne? We want to build submarines and ships in Australia, but we can't make steel.
What is it going to mean for places like Henderson? What does it mean for our Defence capability in this country that we are going to rely on international supply chains at a time when this government says we are living in the most dangerous strategic environment since the end of the Second World War? This Labor government has followed a net-zero ideology, and what it has done is kill the industrial base in Australia.
They have gutted it. It has meant that towns like Whyalla won't prosper anymore. Those 600 people are going to have to move away and find jobs elsewhere.
When we do get that new technology, if there is a new blast furnace that the new buyer of the steelworks might invest in and put in—but who knows, because there is still no buyer. There are people that are interested, but, now that the blast furnace doesn't start, are they still interested? Are we still going to be able to sell it, are we still going to be able to make steel, and who is going to make that steel?
The people that have lost their jobs can't sit around and wait six months, until a new buyer comes in, for a new job to be offered to them. This is an absolute, catastrophic failure. This is what following a net-zero ideology is doing to Australia across our whole country, and it's a disgrace.
Question agreed to.