MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator COLBECK (Tasmania) (17:30): I rise with great pleasure to speak on behalf of the coalition in support of Senator Blyth's motion today with respect to the complete failure of the government's Future Made in Australia plan, because it's now become a little more than a future subsidised in Australia plan. That's because of the fact that the Australian government has completely lost control of the Australian economy, particularly in respect of energy prices.
We're seeing the impact of that in major manufacturing enterprises all around Australia, from Whyalla, where we've seen the terrible circumstance of the closure of the blast furnace this week and the terrible impact on 500 employees and all of their families, to other parts of the country, where the government's had to come in with huge swathes of taxpayers' money to ensure that these vital manufacturing facilities can remain here in our country.
The people at Bell Bay aluminium in my home state of Tasmania are still waiting. The government promised on a number of occasions, both the Prime Minister and Minister Bowen, that Bell Bay aluminium would qualify for the green-aluminium credit program. It seems that the green-aluminium credit program no longer exists.
What is the mechanism through which the Australian government is going to keep their promise to the workers at Bell Bay aluminium, the 550 of them, who are still waiting to understand what their future is? It's going to need a contribution from the Commonwealth. There's no question about that.
The state government have said that clearly they can't do it all on their own. When the Commonwealth has spoken about it and when the Prime Minister has spoken about it previously, they've talked about it in the context of a fifty-fifty deal, but there's no sign of anything at this point in time from the Commonwealth. We see this great mirage, this great deception, from the Australian government, where they try and blame everybody else for the problems that are going on—'It's someone else's fault'—but it comes back to the failed policies of this government and the management of the economy that is driving these businesses into the situation that they're finding themselves.
We're spending billions of dollars in taxpayer support at these facilities around the country. We've already poured billions of dollars into Whyalla, and we see the terrible situation where the blast furnace has to close permanently. What is the plan?
We need to understand the plan. We were promised and the people of Whyalla were promised that green energy was going to be the saviour. We were promised that we would become a green-energy exporting superpower.
I remember sitting on the Senate inquiry, the Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, where the whole premise of the inquiry was that Australia would become a green-energy exporting superpower based on green hydrogen. That promise has completely evaporated to the point where the minister now says that he was never really invested in hydrogen, yet it was the promise for making steel at Whyalla.
Why was it never going to work? Why was green aluminium never going to be a viable proposition in Australia? It's simple, and it comes back to the nub of all of the problems that we're seeing with these large manufacturing businesses.
It's the cost of energy. The cost of energy was always too high to support a green-hydrogen industry in this country. When you take into account the cost of the energy and the energy lost through the manufacturing process for green hydrogen, it was never going to be viable, yet the government kept on making promises to our communities that that was going to be a part of the energy grid and that it was going to be a part of the support for manufacturing in this country.
Promise after promise after promise has been failed on. It's no wonder that Australians no longer believe a thing this government says, because Australians can't trust its words, they can't trust its promises, and the communities of this country are being left to pay for that.