AT the last election, Anthony Albanese promised that by the end of his first term Australia would be “an economy that makes more things here at home, powered by cheap renewable energy”.
With the next election expected anytime from August this year, Australians continue to struggle with higher power prices and thousands of manufacturing workers are losing their jobs, thanks to Labor’s economic and energy policies.
These jobs are as recent as last week’s Alcoa aluminium refinery in Perth, with similar fates for working Australians at Tritium’s factory in Brisbane and Sorbent Paper Company.
The Albanese Government has bungled its National Reconstruction Fund, with the fund yet to invest a single cent in an Australian business.
Our country has abundant natural resources that should be processed here, but for too long we have been sending them to China and losing our sovereign manufacturing capacity.
In the Mallee, there are three current mineral sands projects in various stages of consideration, but they require two critical factors to be justifiable. Firstly, they need social licence from the local community, and they need to be manufactured in Australia.
A critical component of processing anything is cheap power, let alone affordable labour. It is in our sovereign interest and would improve social licence because Australian minerals would be supporting Australian jobs.
Rather than China using our minerals to build battery technologies and defence capabilities, it would be far more acceptable to do so in Australia.
The Swan Hill and Gannawarra communities at the centre of these mining projects need mandatory and enforceable commitment that farmland will be rehabilitated to better condition than before mining operations.
The Goschen mine environmental effects statement deadline for submissions has now come and gone.
Victorian Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny has ignored my written request to extend the deadline for the sake of farmers under harvest pressures and failing to give them the time they needed to make submissions. Again, Spring Street is railroading regional communities to achieve their own idealistic goals.
As a federal election looms, Australians are right to be measuring Mr Albanese and his Labor colleagues against their promises – and are finding them coming up very short.
