…
STEVE AUSTIN, HOST: All right, well that’s, so you say Australia can compete. Let me ask you about something else that you’ve announced. Explain to me the logic of investing $1 billion of taxpayers money to build solar panels with AGL and Sundrive in Australia. Why are we going up against, say a country like China, which even according to the former ACCC head Rod Sims, says it’s a real serious question as to whether we can even make them competitively priced compared to what China can build them for?
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: We can make them competitively. It isn’t just for Sundrive. This Solar Shot Program will be a national one to provide incentives. And I’ll tell you why we should –
AUSTIN: Are you building any in Queensland?
PRIME MINISTER: We are open to suggestions and open to partnering and providing that support with manufacturing businesses right throughout Australia.
AUSTIN: So, the answer is not yet?
PRIME MINISTER: This is, well, not yet, but we’re open to it. Just like Queensland businesses will benefit from our National Reconstruction Fund. One of the things, Steve, we need to do is to recognise that we need to be more resilient as an economy. It’s not whether we produce solar panels, it’s how can we afford not to. How can we be dependent when one in three Australian households have solar panels on their roofs, not to have some national resilience here? We have produced the –
AUSTIN: So, we’ll be competing head on with China?
PRIME MINISTER: We will be competing and we can compete. These will be the most efficient, Sundrive have used their innovation to produce the most efficient solar panels in the world and make an enormous difference. And one of the things that’s happening, Steve, is that with the use of new technology and productivity gains, labour as a proportion of the costs of production are less and less. What that means is that Australian businesses can be more competitive because issues like transport, for example, are going to be more and more important in the future so we’re certainly –
AUSTIN: Okay, all right. Who or what will be the customers for these solar panels? If these Australian, these are taxpayer subsidised, Australian built solar panels, who will the customers be?
PRIME MINISTER: Your listeners, Steve.
AUSTIN: Well, my listeners tend to buy on price, and if they can get a Chinese solar panel at a much cheaper price than an Australian taxpayer subsidised one, wouldn’t they be more inclined to go for the cheaper priced one? Which is what’s happening at the moment?
PRIME MINISTER: No, Australian businesses can compete. If you look at what’s happening around the world, whether it’s Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, whether it be, China, of course, has subsidies through state owned enterprises. You need to recognise that we need to be more resilient. And we make no apologies for wanting a future made in Australia, for wanting manufacturing brought back here. Now, in the 1970s and 1980s, we saw a flight of capital, we saw jobs all going overseas. We have all the resources to power the twenty-first century. We have the copper and the lithium and the nickel and the vanadium – all of these essential resources. What we need to do is continue to export, but where possible value add here. And we have the best solar resources in the world in terms of the sun up above us, which of course, is free. We also have enormous space, so that as the world moves towards carbon tariffs, which the European Union is doing, and other nations, we will be incredibly competitive. We can not only produce solar panels here, we can produce things like green aluminium there in central Queensland. We can produce green steel. We can be a manufacturing powerhouse again if we’re smart and if we have faith in ourselves.
###
Source: Office of the Australian Prime Minister
Speaker: The Hon. Anthony Albanese MP, Prime Minister of Australia
Format: Interview
China Policy Research 