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.

Nine years ago, when Sanjeev Gupta took over Whyalla steelworks, there were celebrations all round. The people of Whyalla even gave him a parade and called him the 'saviour' of our steel industry. Gupta told South Australians that Whyalla would produce green steel, with a long-term goal for a megaplant. Gupta made a lot of promises to the people in George Town too, in Tasmania, where he bought the LIBERTY Bell Bay manganese smelter. He promised billions in investment and a secure future for the plant and its workers. Less than five years later, LIBERTY Bell Bay has closed and taken 217 secure jobs with it—a gut punch for the people of George Town. Gupta made promises of a great future everywhere he went, and he's left those workers and communities shattered. There's no praise for him now at Whyalla steelworks, LIBERTY Bell Bay or Tahmoor coalmine.

According to Paul Barry's new book, The Big Steal, Gupta's scam worked like this: buy a run-down steelworks, aluminium smelter or power station in a town heavily dependent on it; and promise to invest millions and turn it into a modern, environmentally friendly asset. But it was all rubbish, because Gupta's money was all borrowed. One day, in August 2024, Gupta splashed out $12.5 million for a waterfront apartment on Sydney's Finger Wharf. At that very moment, in Whyalla, steelworkers were working under intense heat to restart the ageing blast furnace that Gupta had promised to replace and traders in the town were trying to extract the millions of dollars he owed them. As Barry says in his book, everybody wanted to believe Gupta, but nobody did their due diligence, including Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board. Again, where was Gupta's money coming from? Had this bloke pulled off a miracle anywhere else? Paul Barry says that at least $1 billion was siphoned off by Gupta from Australian businesses in Whyalla, in South Australia; Bell Bay, in Tasmania; and Tahmoor, in New South Wales.

Tasmania has some experience with dodgy decisions made by the Foreign Investment Review Board. Not only is their due diligence clearly lacking; when they apply conditions, they can't actually enforce them. If the government wants its Future Made in Australia policy to work, fixing the Foreign Investment Review Board should be its top priority. While they're at it, they might want to address the fact that the government have no strategic plan for Australian industry. What do we need onshore, how much do we need, what have we got, and what is the Department of Industry, Science and Resources actually doing?

I raised my concerns about Whyalla and Bell Bay repeatedly with state and federal governments. I wrote to ASIC, whose position in March 2025 was this:

ASIC is aware of the concerns regarding the entity operating Whyalla steelworks and is actively monitoring the situation.

Great—still monitoring, are you? At the time of the federal government's intervention in Whyalla, the steelworks was $1.3 billion in debt and it was losing 1.3 million bucks a day. It looks to me like the regulator, once again, was asleep at the wheel. We have established a model where the federal government only gets involved at the point of crisis—intervention that is much too little, much too late.

The National Reconstruction Fund has eight potential focus areas, which include 'alumina and aluminium' and 'iron and steel'. Why are these potential areas? Why aren't they essential areas? We can't have a future made in Australia unless we have steel, manganese and aluminium.

This Australian government has to stop playing catch-up. We need a 20-year plan, we need the investment and we need it now. And, in cases like Whyalla and LIBERTY Bell Bay, the government must recognise their national importance and take a stake in them. Stop handing out money all the time. Get something back. Become private investors. I don't care. Goodness me! You can't keep putting money in. If you had known what we did in Whyalla—we could see this going down the drain. It was all happening. We all knew this well over 12 months ago. Otherwise, our future will be at the mercy of ships hoping to make it through waters threatened by Iran, the Houthi rebels, China, America or whatever militant takes the stage tomorrow.

As the last speaker on this motion, I want to express my thoughts and sympathies for the people of Whyalla. I know they're going through it tough, particularly those employed directly by the steelworks but also the families that sit behind those workers, that support those workers, and all the associated businesses in Whyalla that will be deeply impacted.

I also acknowledge the contribution by Senator Lambie, who focused on the corporate failures here. There are a lot of times in this chamber when each side of politics is blaming the other. I come from corporate Australia, but when I started my journey in life I was a young lawyer in Port Augusta advising the Australian Workers' Union, and I spent a lot of time in Whyalla. These failures are a series of poor decision-making by corporate Australia and corporates internationally where they undercapitalise these facilities and then the workers and the families of the workers suffer. You can't magically sum up this sort of failure at this scale. Governments of all political persuasions do their best, with the best of intentions, to try to shore up and fund these important facilities that give us sovereign capability. The corporates ask for this money and often expense it in bad faith.

As a body politic, we need to think about how we're going to address these issues with these important industries going forward. I'm almost at the point on my political journey where I think maybe we just need to build a steel mill ourselves and own it as a state facility, and that is a long way for a Liberal to come. We just can't keep funding these corporate giants, often on a global scale, that undercapitalise these facilities. I have been to Whyalla. I have been to these facilities. They are ancient, from a steel-building perspective. They're not as efficient on a global scale.

If we want to see families in this important community in my state thrive, we need to give families certainty. They need to be able to decide to put down their roots, not just come to Adelaide to add to the population of Adelaide but to live happy, healthy lives in facilities which are powered by clean energy and are not continuing to contribute to environmental degradation, because that won't be sustainable either. At some point, Australian society will not tolerate that—again, undercutting the certainty.

There's been a lot said about net zero—rubbish. I think that if we want sovereign capability we're going to have to work out how to fund it in a sustainable way, and we're going to need to hold the corporates to account. We've had two wounds in South Australia. We've just had Whyalla, we have the smelter at Port Pirie on almost a five-year cycle or longer, we've had the algal bloom, and we now have bird flu. We're a small population in a vast state. We know that we have the goodwill of the federal parliament, but don't let the corporates off the hook. Do not let years of selfishness and greed be disguised at the moment of failure.

The South Australian government, even though it's of a different political persuasion, is doing its best. It has the goodwill of its Liberal senators. We hope that they will be successful in finding a solution and that we build a sustainable steel mill in Whyalla. But the decision-making is not going to be easy and the problems are similar to those around the world. I end with my thoughts for the workers.

The question is the urgency motion as moved by Senator Blyth be agreed to.