Australia is heading for a manufacturing wasteland under Labor’s green insanity - Sky News Australia

Australia will pass a grim anniversary in the history of manufacturing this weekend.

The last ream of Australian-made white copy paper rolled off the production line at the Maryville mill near Traralgon in eastern Victoria on January 21 last year.

The last batch of Australian-manufactured Reflex copy paper meant 150 green redundancies - jobs lost as a direct result of government-driven decisions.

The mill’s owners, Opal Australia, struggled to find timber after the Supreme Court of Victoria shut down critical operations of VicForests last year.

Litigants Environment East Gippsland and Kinglake Friends of the Forest were responsible for the action.

Still, it merely accelerated the Andrews Labor government’s decision to phase out native timber logging by 2030.

Like all manufacturing companies, Opal Australia was under pressure from energy costs, which are rising under Labor’s plan to reduce carbon emissions at breakneck speed.

Rising energy costs have been punishing companies like Trident Plastics, which has been doing its best to encourage recycling by manufacturing red, yellow and green-topped wheelie bins at its factory in Adelaide.

Yet the plastic injection moulding process is inescapably energy-hungry.

Plastic pellets must be heated to high temperatures for melting and moulding. Producing an average 120-litre bin requires around 250 kWh of electricity.

South Australia currently boasts the highest proportion of wind and solar power of any mainland state, but it is also the most expensive.

Last June, Trident went into receivership placing the jobs of 160 South Australians at risk.

Should the company close, wheelie bins must be imported from interstate, adding to their carbon footprint.

Wheelie bin manufacturers are just small fry in the growing number of companies struggling to make a profit with rising input costs.

The phased shutdown of Alcoa’s Kwinana alumina refinery in WA will put 550 people out of work by the third quarter of this year with a knock-on effect in the local community.

It would not be unduly harsh to say things are not going according to plan for Anthony Albanese's government, which came to power with an energy policy based on catastrophically faulty modelling.

Slashing power bills by $275 was not the only benefit Albanese claimed would flow from its plan to cut carbon emissions.

We were also told there would be 604,000 new green jobs, with four out of five in the regions. That promise rings hollow for workers in the growing number of businesses sent to the wall by rising energy costs.

Advance Bricks is closed its business at Stawell, Victoria in 2022 after 82 years in business.

The company, which employed 23 people, faced a rise in the price of gas from $6-to-$8 a gigajoule to more than $37.

Australian-manufactured toilet paper, kitchen rolls and tissues may soon join our copy paper as a distant memory as the Sorbent Paper Company struggles to cope with a 300 per cent rise in the cost of gas.

Last year, the company called for volunteers for redundancy in preparation for the closure and offshoring of some operations at its Box Hill, Victoria plant.

Sorbent napkins are now made overseas, and the manufacture of facial tissues at Box Hill will end early this year.

Facial tissue manufacturing at Greystanes, Sydney, has also been moved offshore, although Sorbent has committed to retain as many Australian manufacturing jobs as it can under difficult circumstances.

The notion that Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target for 2030 would reduce the cost of energy and create jobs flies in the face of common sense.

The rapid decarbonisation of our electricity grids requires hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment, which must be recouped over time in taxes or power prices.

Rising energy prices and the tight supply in the gas sector would inevitably lead to job losses, starting with those in heavy industry that could be easily located in countries with lower energy prices and less stringent environmental regulations.

In 2019, environmental economist Brian Fisher conducted some of the most comprehensive modelling of the flow-on effects of reducing carbon emissions.

He found that Labor’s then target of a 45 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 would lead to a contraction of the entire economy and cause particular pain to the manufacturing sector.

He forecasted a 15.8 percent contraction in the manufacture of chemicals, rubber, and plastic and a 9.3 percent reduction in the manufacture of non-metallic goods.

He forecast a loss of 336,000 jobs economy wide.

The then Labor leader Bill Shorten scoffed at Mr Fisher's report, accusing it of being politically driven and falsely claiming the fossil fuel industry had financed it.

Yet a little more than half-way through the Albanese government’s first time, Mr Fisher’s modelling looks close to the mark.

The promise of lower energy prices and a glut of green jobs now sits with the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Nick Cater is a Senior Fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a contributor to Sky News Australia.

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2024-01-20 19:19:25Z
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