Anthony Albanese says smelters will shut and value many roles with out their newly introduced aluminium manufacturing incentive, which opposition chief Peter Dutton has labelled a “con job”.
The mining trade welcomed $2bn in federal funding to incentivise power-intensive aluminium producers to modify to renewables by 2036, with Rio Tinto calling it a “critical piece in helping future-proof the industry”.
The Albanese authorities will present Australian smelters with a tax manufacturing credit score for each tonne of unpolluted aluminium they make over a interval of 10 years.
The prime minister mentioned the funding would guarantee smelters – which immediately make use of not less than 20,000 individuals, by trade estimates – stayed onshore and Australia was not left on the finish of the worldwide provide chain.
“If there is a lesson from the pandemic, it’s that Australia cannot continue to be just at the end of supply chains, be vulnerable as a national economy by not making things here,” he mentioned.
“We need to be more than a quarry. We need to be a country that value adds ourselves, not that exports the raw material, waits for someone else to create jobs and value add, and then import the products back.”
Kellie Parker, the chief government of Rio Tinto, mentioned the announcement secured the long-term way forward for its Queensland smelter.
“This is a belief in manufacturing. It’s a belief in jobs, it’s a belief in [the] aluminium industry,” she mentioned.
Aluminium smelters are energy-intensive. Evaluation from early 2023 confirmed that 4 smelters and two aluminium refineries used about 10% of the east coast’s vitality grid.
The aluminium trade had beforehand warned it might require authorities funding, together with in constructing underlying transmission traces from renewable vitality sources, to assist its efforts to go inexperienced throughout the decade.
Rio Tinto referred to as on the federal government to assist the aluminium trade’s transition to renewable vitality to keep away from the chance of smelters shutting down by 2030.
The corporate on Monday mentioned the brand new transfer put Australia on the trail of turning into a frontrunner in inexperienced metals manufacturing.
However the opposition chief described the plan as a “fantasy”, saying Australia wanted a nuclear energy trade as a substitute of relying solely on renewable sources firmed by gasoline.
“For the prime minister’s policy to work – let’s just understand the practicalities of this – he would have to install 22,000 solar panels every single day. He would need 40 wind turbines each month and require 28,000km of poles and wires to deliver this policy,” Dutton mentioned.
“It’s a $2bn con job, and it’s going to drive up power prices, and it’s going to deliver blackouts and brownouts.”
Dutton added that he couldn’t title a smelter powered by wind, photo voltaic or battery on the earth.
Albanese accused the Coalition, and particularly its junior associate the Nationals, of being destructive, flagging that smelters would shut and jobs can be misplaced with out the manufacturing incentive.
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“The Nationals not only want to take Australia backwards, they want the rest of Australia to go backwards and keep them company,” he mentioned.
Labor’s trade minister, Ed Husic, echoing the message, mentioned the Coalition had “wasted three years not coming up with policy”.
“What’s your plan to make sure we protect blue collar jobs? Completely missing in action. It’s not good enough to be under-prepared going into an election year with no policy and no ability to explain to blue collar communities across the country how you’re backing manufacturing.”
A lot of smelters in Australia are making ready to modify to 100% renewable vitality within the coming decade. Tomago Aluminium, Australia’s largest aluminium smelter, introduced in 2021 it might “for all intents and purposes” be 100% renewable by 2029.
The identical 12 months, Australian energy firm Alinta Vitality introduced plans to construct an offshore windfarm off Victoria to assist Alcoa’s Portland aluminium smelter go inexperienced.
In a Sunday opinion piece within the Australian Monetary Evaluation, the vitality minister, Chris Bowen, criticised the opposition’s nuclear vitality coverage, which assumes Australia will want much less energy in Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales.
“The cop-out of assuming lower industrial demand simply signals a country doing less, producing less and selling less,” Bowen mentioned.
In saying his nuclear vitality plan in November, Dutton claimed electrical energy costs can be 44% cheaper beneath the $331bn proposal. However this state of affairs was based mostly on Australia having a projected electrical energy demand that’s 45% lower than Labor’s outlook.
“The Coalition has painted itself into a corner with this one,” Bowen wrote. “Either it believes Australian industry productivity is about to fall off a cliff, or it knows the purported cost savings for its ill-thought-out nuclear energy scheme are hot air. It can’t be both.”
