There is nothing it will not destroy in due course.
We can no longer make plastics, nor glass, nor many forms of steel. Soon it will be any and every metal processing as well. AFR.
The chief executive of Nyrstar Australia says the metal processor urgently needs to secure a government rescue package to ensure a future for its loss-making smelters in South Australia and Tasmania as the company’s Swiss owner weighs whether to close the plants within weeks.
…Howell said the assistance would help weather “several hundred million” in losses expected over the next two years while the company considers whether it can upgrade the plants to process the critical minerals that are at the centre of the transition to renewable energy and the defence industry.
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…The crisis underlines the financial struggles faced by manufacturers of aluminium, nickel, copper and other metals amid significant declines in treatment and refining charges, as well as rising energy costs.
China on one side squeezing everybody with overcapacity and the gas cartel on the other (which is also China).
Some of these smelters, perhaps all of them, will be bailed out under the rubric of “Made in Australia”.
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That it is you that is paying to make it isn’t in the slogan, funnily enough. As a quick aside, you are about to pay more directly as well, as energy rebates are wound back nationally.
Struggling families will see fewer dollars come off their electricity bills after the NSW government quietly cut back its energy rebates.
The energy rebate for low-income families with concession cards has been slashed from $350 per year to $285 this financial year. The medical energy rebate, which helps those with certain medical conditions that require extra energy use for treatment, was cut from $350 to $200.
Back to the smelters, the usual suspect is rolled out to give the precise wrong advice.
Tony Wood, the director of the energy program at the Grattan Institute, said government support should only be made available if there was a case that the business was in the national interest.
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“If there’s a plausible argument for it then that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with it,” Wood said. “What I do have a problem with is the government handing out money just because someone shouts loud enough.”
How come the same rationale doesn’t apply to Grattan’s gas cartel sponsor? After all, it was Grattan “shouting” that prevented the vital gas reservation that was needed in 2013 which would have kept energy prices much lower and never led to where we are today for much of our shuttered industry, including metals processing, not to mention your own energy bills.
The gas cartel is an enormous tax on everything via energy prices and will kill it all eventually.
Meanwhile, we hand China every tool of war while equally denuding ourselves the same. Always do the opposite of Grattan’s corrupt advice.
Use Peter Dutton’s excellent gas reservation plan to halve energy costs or watch your nation die as they double.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
