Let’s make stuff in Australia:
Qenos’ last remaining manufacturing plant could be closed by as early as September as the company’s administrators prepare to hand over the site to property developers.
The Australian understands final details of the closure are still to be negotiated, but industry sources say major buyers of Qenos’ products are making arrangements to source alternative supplies from importers by October.
The closure will bring to an end more than 60 years of chemical production at the Altona site.
That is the end of plastics manufacturing in Australia.
How are we going to make stuff without plastic?
More specifically, how are we going to make Albo’s stuff? He says we can make solar panels. Probably wind turbines too.
Australia has everything we need to meet our goal of Net Zero emission by 2050 and become a renewable energy superpower.
We’re backing Australian innovators and manufacturers to build the next generation of solar cells, batteries, and clean energy technology.
We’re ensuring get more wind and solar into our grid, powering our homes and businesses.
And we’re lifting our investment in resources like green hydrogen and critical minerals.
We have the world’s best resources and workers, and abundant wind, solar and other renewable forms of energy to power our economy.
What? No superpower reference?
We don’t have anything we need. We’ll have to import the lot.
10% of solar panels and roughly 20% of wind turbines are complex polymers that we can no longer make.
We don’t have the intellectual property for any of it. We don’t have the know-how for elaborately transformed manufactures like polysilicon, wafer, cell, or module manufacturing. We don’t have cheap energy or gas.
Our one solar manufacturer – domiciled in SA – imports all of its parts and only assembles them here.
That is what Albo is proposing. To pour billions of your money into a black hole of local assembly for components that make about as much sense to Aussies as vapour emanating from a thurible.
Hilariously, not only is this not “making stuff here”, it is the opposite of the benefits of globalised supply chains.
Instead of owning the IP and critical inputs production, we will own nothing and assemble other nations’ critical inputs using massively overpriced local labour.
This isn’t ‘Made in Australia’. It is taking Australians for a ride.
