When the Prime Minister stood before the workers at the Tomago aluminium smelter to announce a $2.5 billion bailout, the cameras were everywhere. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux watched the same footage and drew a very different conclusion: this was a government paying billions to fix a problem its own policies, he argued, had created.
The Biggest User Of Power
Jeremy laid out the basics. The Tomago smelter, in the Hunter, is the largest in Australia and the single biggest user of electricity in the country. A business that draws power on that scale lives or dies by the price and reliability of its electricity.
The Prime Minister’s speech, Jeremy said, mentioned high electricity costs but carefully dodged the real cause, instead seeming to imply coal-fired power was somehow to blame. No, no, no, Prime Minister, was Jeremy’s reply. The problem, in his view, is exactly the reverse.
Cheap Coal Abroad, Dear Power At Home
To sharpen the point, Jeremy looked overseas. Coal-fired power, he noted, is precisely what countries like India lean on, burning Australian coal to make cheap, reliable electricity at around five cents per kilowatt hour. He asked listeners to weigh that against what they pay themselves, and what a heavy user like the smelter must be paying.
You cannot blame coal, he argued. You can only blame Labor’s policies, the net zero and green agenda that, in his telling, has pushed up the price and cut the reliability of Australian power. Cheap, dependable coal-fired electricity is the answer, he suggested, not the culprit.
Rewriting History
What angered Jeremy most was a claim in the speech he flatly rejected. The Prime Minister, he said, blamed the Liberals for exporting manufacturing. That, Jeremy argued, is simply untrue. The offshoring he had in mind traced to Labor and to Gough Whitlam in the 1970s. You cannot alter history, he insisted. Do not lie about it.
For Jeremy, that was the deeper offence, not merely a poor policy, but a bad-faith account of how the country got here, pinning on opponents the outcomes he attributes to Labor’s own record.
It Used To Pay For Itself
The core of Jeremy’s argument was a simple before-and-after. The Tomago smelter, he pointed out, used to be self-supporting and profitable. We never had to bail out businesses like this, he said, until the Prime Minister, his energy minister and their policies arrived.
So now, taxpayers must find $2.5 billion to keep a smelter running that once ran perfectly well alone. What happened, Jeremy asked. His answer was blunt: Labor happened. The bailout, in his view, is less a rescue than a bill for a problem the government manufactured, and then handed to the public.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
