In July last year, wind towers were loaded onto trucks in Portland and headed slowly down the Princes Highway to be installed at the Ryan Corner windfarm. This won’t surprise many readers, who know about the world-leading wind farm manufacturer and the highly skilled AMWU members who work there, located in Portland. By Steve Murphy, National Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union.
What many readers will find surprising is that those wind towers were not made in Australia at Keppel Prince in Portland, but rather imported from overseas and delivered by boat to Portland docks for unloading. It is always disappointing to see anything imported from overseas when it can be made right here by Australian workers, using Australian steel.
What is perhaps even more galling is that those wind towers were being installed at a wind farm that is being underwritten by a long-term power purchase agreement from the Federal Government’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme.
When I found out about the plans to import wind towers for a project funded by the federal government, I got in touch with the Minister and the local member – Dan Tehan. There was still time to solve the problem and ensure that at least some of the towers for the project were built locally. But despite all their rhetoric, when it came time to put their words into actions and put Australian workers first, they failed.
Their decision put the jobs of 150 high-skill, high-wage jobs in regional Victoria at risk for a tiny improvement in the project’s bottom line. Estimates placed the increase in cost from building the towers locally to be around 2% of the overall cost of the project, requiring only a 0.5% increase in the cost of the energy generated by the wind farm. That’s absolute peanuts compared with the importance of supporting this growing industry and these vital jobs.
If that wind farm had been underwritten by the Victorian Government’s Renewable Energy Target, it would have required 64% local content, 90% locally milled steel and for 90% of the jobs during the operational phase to be held by local workers. Because this farm was underwritten by the Federal Government, all those workers, their families and our regional communities missed out.
Time and again we’ve seen state and federal governments buy things from overseas for a lower price ending up paying more for an inferior product. The NSW ferries that are filled with asbestos and that don’t fit under bridges, trains that don’t fit the platforms or through tunnels, and trams out of action for 18 months with extensive cracking are just some examples.
Renewable energy projects are not immune from similar failings. Last year news broke that the Stockyard Hill wind farm – supported again by the Federal Government through their Large-Scale Renewable Energy Targets – had extensive cracking in its Chinese-made wind turbines. Yet again Australian workers have missed out and we’ve been left with substandard products that don’t work.
Another sad Australian story in renewable energy is Tindo Solar, Australia’s only solar panel manufacturer, who is struggling to beat out cheaper imports from countries that will do anything to dominate the global market in renewable manufacturing.
There is huge demand for solar panels in Australia – from roof tops to utility scale – and our researchers have been at the cutting edge of solar technology for decades. Thanks to those advantages, we had a domestic solar industry ready to take off in the early 2000s.
But thanks to illegal market manipulation via the dumping of cheap solar panels at below their cost of production, and a lack of investment and support from the Federal Government, that industry never got off the ground. So now, panels built with Australian-developed technologies are employing millions of workers around the world, while we import almost all of the solar panels that go on Australian roofs.
The Howard-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison approach to industry policy has failed, it is time for a new approach that puts Australian workers and Australian businesses first and gives them the best opportunity to compete on the world stage. Governments around the world are doing everything they can to give their local businesses and workers a leg-up so that they can win the good-quality, high-skill, high-wage manufacturing jobs that our low-carbon future will be built on.
In Australia, our Government seems intent on sitting on its hands and hoping that “the market” will create the jobs, wages and living standards that Australian workers deserve. Ten years with no wage growth, increasing insecure work and a huge drop in apprenticeships shows that this just isn’t working and sells our country short.
As I mentioned in my last column, it is time to move beyond the climate wars and focus on what we can all be doing to deliver better jobs and a secure future for our country. The world is moving towards a low-carbon future and unless we start doing that to, we’ll be left behind.
We’ve got all the ingredients we need to be a global manufacturing powerhouse in a low-carbon future. If we stick our heads in the sand we will continue to miss out on the opportunities to create and secure industries and manufacturing for the future. It isn’t the politicians and their resource industry backers that will suffer, it will be the working men and women in our suburbs and regions and the struggling local businesses who will watch their jobs and opportunities travel offshore.
We can’t afford to allow that happen.
We must support Aussie made.