Opinion piece by Ian Waters, Senior Project Engineer for K&R Fabrications in Wollongong. Ian is an active campaigner for the Australian steel industry within the Illawarra region.
There is something special and exciting about the Australian Steel Industry. It has investment values in the billions, complex processes involving heat and mass transfer, and chemical transformations, as well as complex metallurgy.
It is an industry filled with innovators who will “always find a way” and plays a major role in our national development by creating many apprenticeships, highly skilled roles and tertiary qualified technical experts.
It is an industry that employs 100,000 people and is the lifeblood for many more, making a massive contribution to the mining, transport, quarrying, timber, education and services sectors.
Unfortunately though, the steel industry has parallels to the challenges facing other sectors such as the car manufacturing, food processing, textile and timber industries. A combination of cheap imports, government policies, high costs, over-priced energy, the strong Australian dollar, high domestic transport costs and lack of new investment threaten to undermine the domestic steel industry.
A significant number of stakeholders within the steel industry believe that not enough politicians are advocating strongly enough to uphold the wonderful contribution made to our nation by Australian steelmakers, their upstream suppliers, and the downstream fabricators and secondary processors.
These stakeholders find it ironic that a country that produces some of the world’s best iron ore and coking coal and that has the intellectual capital to develop ground breaking initiatives, such as thin strip casting and the recycling of car tyres into electric arc furnaces, has a steel industry that struggles to survive every time there is even a slight economic downturn.
In 2015, many Illawarra and Shoalhaven businesses united to obtain signatures on a petition asking the NSW Government to use good quality Australian steel in their infrastructure projects. Steelworkers, community groups and unions also gathered signatures for the petition, and after a short time, signatures started to flow in from Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. The petition achieved 15,300 signatures, forcing a debate in Parliament.
In addition, over 60 businesses related to the steel industry made submissions to the NSW Government enquiry into infrastructure and a second submission to the Australian Senate Inquiry into the Future of Australia’s Steel Industry.
The pressure from these campaigns and submissions, together with hard work from other groups in Australia, is making a difference to the way governments view steelmaking and manufacturing within our country.
The industry has a future.
To find out more about the future of the industry within the Illawarra Region, please RSVP to the Illawarra and Southerland Regional group’s panel discussion to debate the pros and cons associated with maintaining steel manufacturing.
Image: istock