South Wind

Federal and South Australian leaders had a trying time last week explaining how their funding support over many years had failed to stop the demise of the blast furnace at Whyalla steel works.

On the other hand, Nationals leader Matt Canavan wasn’t holding back. Closing Australia’s only producer of structural steel, he said, meant that “we can’t make steel to make buildings, bridges or railway lines.”

“It’s not just a practical or productivity issue, it’s now a national security issue… It is an indictment on Australian energy and industry and our national security that we have lost the last blast furnace in this country to make structural steel,” he said.

He’s right – up to a point. Whyalla’s 60-year old blast furnace supplied less than a sixth of the steel Australia needs, but it was the only domestic source of rail and structural steel.

As the world’s largest iron ore exporter Australia ought to produce all the steel it needs instead of the current 65 per cent, but technical and market realities dictate otherwise. Even accounting for transport costs, China’s far larger mills, cheaper labour and huge domestic market give its steel a cost advantage over the local product.

But what’s really getting under Matt Caravan’s skin is government policy demanding that steelmaking embraces new low-carbon technologies, bringing to an end those long-standing icons of the industry, coal-fired blast furnaces.

Iron and steel production is the world’s highest industrial emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for roughly 10 per cent of global emissions and surpassing entire sectors like aviation.

Both contenders to buy the Whyalla works – India’s Jindal Steel International and Brisbane-based M Resources – favour alternatives to coal-fired steelmaking. Both were fully across the loss of the blast furnace and have factored that into future plans focused on electric arc and electric smelting furnaces – technologies that are developing rapidly in both Asia and Europe.

So all parties with a continuing interest in the business want to run Whyalla as a green steel producer, using renewable solar energy instead of thermal coal. The pressure is now on the federal and South Australian governments to make sure that unlike its departing owner, Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, the new proprietor is capable of keeping the operation going.

Most pressure is coming from political opponents of any and every move to eliminate the burning of coal in the production of steel and other metals. The treatment of this issue by Matt Canavan and One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce puts them among the disreputable minority globally (including many of their political colleagues) who trivialise efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

But cutting steelmaking emissions is anything but plain sailing. It needs time, a lot of hard thinking and more than a little inspiration to transform this country’s entire energy and steelmaking regimes. And that calls for a level of patience that an adversarial political system rarely allows.

A steady, reliable supply of green hydrogen obtained from water by electrolysis remains central to Whyalla’s long-term future. That needs abundant clean energy. Until it’s available, “grey” hydrogen derived from a mixture of natural gas and super-hot steam will power steelmaking – and also the decarbonising of iron ore for export, making that product marketable in Europe.

Shutting their ears to political detractors, Australian mining and metallurgy companies have committed serious resources to developing electric smelting technology. They know it’s a long, hard slog, but they also know it can work. Like so many inventions (LED lighting, for instance, invented 99 years ago), it just needs time.

Laboratory-scale electric smelting using hydrogen is happening in Newcastle, NSW, and multiple similar projects are under way in WA. NeoSmelt, a joint venture at Kwinana, WA, is underpinned by capital from all the big names in Australian steel plus Mitsubishi Corporation – along with gas giant Woodside Energy, betting on returns from grey hydrogen.

A month ago, Andrew Forrest’s company Fortescue announced it had produced the first hot metal at its electric smelting plant at Christmas Creek in the Pilbara. And showing off its green energy commitment, last week Fortescue launched a racing team, Fortescue Zero, to compete in the all-electric Formula E World Championship.

Australian innovation extends to the electricity grid. In the race to replace retiring coal-fired power with solar, wind and battery storage, a potential blackout risk is being addressed by the Western Downs Battery storage project using virtual synchronous machines, a new invention involving a wholesale rethink of inverter technology.

This Australian world-first is happening on the Darling Downs in Matt Canavan’s home state of Queensland. But I’d hazard a small bet that he’s too hell-bent on resuscitating coal power to notice.

Tasmania has more than one world class museum. Readers will know about the Mona miracle so there’s no need to go into that, except to say its creator, David Walsh, has recalled spending many long hours as a child in our state museum, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, or TMAG.

Dating back to the early 1840s, this museum is the country’s second oldest, after Sydney’s Australian Museum. It is special in another way. Unlike all other states Tasmania has its scientific, historical and art collections integrated in the one institution.

And now, through no fault of its own, TMAG is in trouble.

Walsh’s TMAG story didn’t end in childhood. In 2006, looking around Australia for a designer who could implement his unique, theatrical vision, he found the creative talent he wanted right here, in TMAG’s own exhibition designer Adrian Spinks.

This story is personal. In 1980 I sat alongside TMAG’s then-designer Jane Burrell on the panel that picked Adrian to take on the design and production of exhibitions for our state museum.

I’m proud to say we got it right. Adrian was instrumental in TMAG’s metamorphosis from a respectable colonial art and science institution into the cultural hub that it is today with interests and responsibilities covering art and culture, history, science and the natural environment. On his watch and since, TMAG has become one of our state’s crown jewels.

In the early 2000s I had the pleasure of working with Adrian as an adviser for “Islands to Ice”, a new TMAG exhibit about Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. That innovative, immersive exhibition caught the attention of David Walsh as Mona was forming in his mind. He head-hunted Adrian, and the rest is history. Adrian’s illustrious career ended when he retired last July.

TMAG and Mona have played off each other in ways that have immensely enriched Tasmania. The difference is that Mona is an individual’s enterprise while TMAG is a collective one, whose exhibitions and collections are expressions of our community’s life and times.

That story covers two centuries of colonial and post-colonial Tasmania, tens of thousands of years of pre-colonial Lutruwita, and millions of years in which our island’s unique flora, fauna and landforms evolved after its separation from the southern supercontinent, Gondwana.

TMAG’s brief as the state museum is to reflect and enhance our state’s values. Its success is due mainly to a skilled, dedicated staff and the tireless efforts of a large cohort of volunteers, building on a long history of community involvement with the museum’s work.

TMAG exhibitions are a fraction of its functions and responsibilities. Its collections, now around a million items, represent the things that make our island special: its unique geology and and life forms and its human story, including fine and decorative arts, before and after colonisation.

This is a huge responsibility. By law, TMAG is the state repository for the things we choose to keep, a tiny fraction of which is on display. The fruits of nearly two centuries of collecting, housed in purpose-built sites at Rosny and the University of Tasmania, rely on active care and attention. The recent loss of Tungatinah power station shows what can happen when that is withdrawn.

And this has come at a bargain basement price for government. Colin Thomas, chair of the TMAG Foundation, pointed out last week that the government spends nothing on acquiring art and historical artefacts. All of that has come from donations and fundraising.

Now, with state coffers running on empty, rumours are flying that museum jobs are to be cut by nearly a third. The government denies this but has acknowledged “efficiency measures” and voluntary redundancies.

The departmental entity that encompasses TMAG has just been rebranded from Department of State Growth to Building Tasmania. All governments aspire to eternal growth, but in especially constricted times both these names are the ultimate in wishful thinking. Now, to conceal financial problems, the government is cutting off what it sees as low-hanging fruit.

Early this century then-premier Jim Bacon rationalised state funding for a new home for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra by declaring TSO to be a state icon, on the basis that that a financial bottom line is not the only measure of value. Thanks to that, we still have our orchestra.

Which takes us to the core of the TMAG dilemma. Oscar Wilde wrote that cynics are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Our government of cynics knows nothing about this venerable institution except its budget bottom line.

Desperate to conceal a financial emergency, the government is now playing roulette with things that really matter. The concealment is bad enough, but inflicting this damage on TMAG is unforgivable.

A Lowy Institute debate last month on the value of Australia’s massive AUKUS nuclear submarine commitment, featuring two well-credentialled defence analysts, revealed troubling problems with the Australia-US military alliance.

The same signal, but much louder, came last week from the non-official “AUKUS Public Inquiry”, backed by the Australia Institute, which is premised on the urgent need for such a discussion after the secrecy and deceit that surrounded its beginnings under Scott Morrison’s government.

Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie told the inquiry that AUKUS signified “an appalling abandonment of proper process”. He said the Albanese Government’s decision to charge ahead with the deal when it could have critically revisited it “just goes to show that they’ve also drunk the Kool-Aid”.

In 2003 Wilkie ended a career in military intelligence by resigning and publicly accusing the Howard government of lying about going to war in Iraq. Last week the independent MP warned that AUKUS forced Australia into relying on crewed boats for decades ahead, at an “eyewatering” cost, while locking us into alliance with a country that has become “an unreliable ally”.

Such a notion has yet to surface in the Labor government; certainly not in the mind of defence minister Richard Marles. He beamed with delight last week in the company of America’s self-styled “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, and declared that AUKUS is on track. But a chronic shortfall in US naval shipbuilding guarantees only that if those subs ever happen, they’ll be many years late.

Less than halfway through Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the “nothing to see here” approach still favoured by Australia has lost its shine elsewhere. And the country leading that reappraisal turns out to be Canada, known for going quietly about its business while its powerful neighbour struts its stuff.

Needing to replace retired PM Justin Trudeau, in March last year Canada’s governing Liberal party chose Mark Carney, a celebrated global economist and former head of both Canada’s and Britain’s reserve banks. Carney turned Canadian politics on its head. On the back of Trump fantasising that Canada should be a US state, his Liberals won the national election in a landslide.

Canada has been a thorn in Trump’s side ever since. After his first round of tariffs were deemed illegal by the US Supreme Court, in July the US president announced new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

Trade talks collapsed when Trump insisted that Canada drop official support for the French language and stop negotiating foreign agreements he doesn’t approve of. Declaring Canadian sovereignty to be non-negotiable, Carney announced reciprocal Canadian tariffs on US imports, starting today.

Carney’s election slogan was “Canada strong”. Last week he said this: “The most important thing we can do is not to spend all our time waiting… No. It’s building here, building bold, building now… making agreements with all of those countries around the world who want to deal with Canada.”

Far from waiting for a trade war to cripple his country, he’s made multiple new trade deals around the world. Besides massively expanding Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic ports, he’s building new icebreakers and a 1000 km fast train service, and last week announced a multi-billion-dollar deal to make passenger rail cars in Canada. This is Canada’s version of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal.

In another New Deal echo, Carney is transforming Canadian defence. He’s prioritising domestic manufacturing, speeding up procurement processes, and forging international security partnerships outside the US system. Canada has already reached NATO’s defence spending benchmark of two per cent of GDP and aims to go much higher.

Pete Hegseth, who is said to fear competent underlings, has overseen the forced departure or “early retirement” – purge is the word being used – of at least 25 top Pentagon officers, all of whom swore to defend US constitutional democracy. With military leadership ranks so thin during a major war, alarm bells are now ringing after last week’s resignation of US army secretary Dan Driscoll.

Trump is no longer an object of derision. Trumpian intimidation is a clear and present danger to democracy and the rule of law everywhere. Openly speculating on reasons for Trump to keep Hegseth in his job, some senators are formally seeking Hegseth’s assurance, so far not forthcoming, that troops won’t be deployed to polling places during November’s midterm elections.

Canada signals that Trump’s foreign and economic policy is actually about subjugation, borne out by facts on the ground. That front-line experience, the knowledge that an American dictatorship could swallow it up, is Canada’s warning for the world.

Carney leads a growing resistance in every country that subscribes to the absolute sanctity of the vote. We now must ask of our own leaders: In this growing crisis, where is Australia?