…
GARETH PARKER, NINE PERTH NEWS DIRECTOR: And a lot of the focus of what you’ve told us this morning is around critical minerals. It’s finding that next generation materials. Your government has spoken a lot about that. You are investing directly in some projects in this state and around the country to facilitate that. Underlying it all it seems to me the theme is geopolitical competition, and you touched on it in your remarks today that this is the way that the world is going. Is it your view that we are seeing, and there was one country you didn’t mention by name, which is China, this state’s largest customer and the source of so much of our prosperity. Do you think that there is an acceleration of geopolitical competition going on? Because certainly people in this space think that there is, and I take for example the Iluka CEO, Tom O’Leary, who said yesterday that he believes that China is weaponising the supply of rare earths. Is all of this activity from your government in this space a bid to protect ourselves from that geopolitical competition?
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Part of the context is the lesson of the pandemic as well. During the pandemic I gave speeches about learning the lessons that our economy needs to be more resilient. It is not desirable that as the world has more and more solar panels on roofs, over 90 per cent are produced in just one country. What that means is that any disruption to trade, it might be through a pandemic, caused disruption of course, means that we’re more vulnerable. But that’s part of the context, the need for more national resilience, for us to be more secure and being able to make more things, be it pharmaceuticals or other products that we need. But there’s a secondary component to our approach here as well, which is this is an enormous opportunity. In the seventies, eighties, nineties, we saw a lot of manufacturing leave this country because of labour. The changes with the ubiquitous nature of new technology, which a discovery in one place is pretty soon used all around the world, means that labour as a proportion of the costs of production is far less than it was 20 years ago. And that will be more so the case with increased use of AI, robotics, the way that technology is changing production. And what that means is that Australia all of a sudden, because transportation costs are a much higher proportion of the cost of production, all of a sudden as well with new energy, particularly the potential that’s there for green hydrogen to be used to produce green steel, green aluminium. All of a sudden Australia finds ourselves at a position of comparative advantage.
PARKER: Only if that green energy is cheap though, and affordable.
PRIME MINISTER: That’s right.
PARKER: At the moment we do not have cheap energy prices in this country. We once did, globally speaking, now we do not. Which seems remarkably counterintuitive, given that we are blessed with both traditional petrochemical forms of energy and we aspire to be an emerging energy superpower with sun, wind and everything else.
PRIME MINISTER: That’s true. But the cheapest form of new energy, we know, is renewables. We have the space to be able to produce, I know Simon from Rio is going to talk this morning. They just signed a really substantial deal for renewables in Gladstone, in Central Queensland as well. You had the potential of green hydrogen being produced by clean energy – solar, wind, being able to be used to then power advanced manufacturing. And the thing about green hydrogen as well is that it is going to be more important to co-locate, if you like, the production of the energy to its use. Which means there will be an advantage here potentially to make green steel, green aluminium. And that will put Australia, if we get this right the next decade can set us up for decades ahead as well. What we do today, when this is really the action moment. Because the world is responding similarly. And if we just stand still or we go through the position of saying, ‘No, we won’t do anything, we’ll have a nuclear reactor’, even though we won’t be able to say where they’re going to go, and no one will finance it, and it’s the most expensive form, the world will just go past us. But we have to seize the opportunities which are there, which is why my team, the economic team, Jim Chalmers, Katy Gallagher, along with Chris Bowen, Ed Husic, Madeleine King in critical minerals, are so determined to, where we can, to value add. Exporting our resources will still be really important into the future. We’re not saying it’s either or, we’re saying though, let’s not miss the opportunity that we have now to seize what’s there. Which is the potential for us to have an extraordinary comparative advantage, and the states that are best positioned to gain from that are WA and Queensland, are our traditional resources states.
PARKER: Which is probably where the next election’s going to be won as well. Happy coincidence, perhaps. Please keep the questions coming through on Slido, there’s obviously impossible to get to all of them, but what I can see in the screen in front of me is some themes coming through. So I will get to those in due course. I do want to talk, and it goes to my earlier question about China and geopolitical competition and sort of, reshoring that seems to be going on globally. The pointy end of all of this is the work that the Australian Navy is doing right at the moment in the Yellow Sea. We had an incident on Saturday night which your Defence Minister, Richard Marles spoke to my colleague, Andrew Probyn about it on Nine News earlier this week. That is that Chinese military planes fired off flares in front of an Australian helicopter. Very dangerous, could have killed Australian service people. Last night the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said these words, I want to get your reaction to them. The spokesman said that Australia’s warships and aircraft deliberately approached China’s airspace under the guise of implementing United Nations Security Council resolutions, causing trouble and provocation, endangering China’s maritime and air security. Did we do that?
PRIME MINISTER: I stand by the comments that the Defence Minister made in calling out this behaviour as unprofessional and unacceptable, and the comments that I made as well. And I did see those comments, and I noted that what’s not said but when you look at the comments, they say approaching. So, it’s a confirmation that Australia, this chopper, was in international airspace. We were in international waters, international airspace, upholding international law through the UN sanctions that have been imposed on North Korea.
PARKER: Do you agree with that characterisation, that that’s the way that our armed forces are behaving? That we’re deliberately approaching China’s airspace and that they’re causing trouble and provocation and endangering China’s maritime air security?
PRIME MINISTER: No, I don’t. And those words in themselves are a confirmation that we weren’t in Chinese airspace. They are confirmation that we were behaving as we should have, as good international citizens. And there shouldn’t be a risk to Australian Defence Force personnel while we’re undertaking that work. I’ve been very clear that where we disagree with China we’ll say so, we’ll call it out. We’ll cooperate wherever we can, and we’ll continue to engage, and we’ve done that with this incident.
PARKER: Will you raise this directly with President Xi when you next meet, inaudible
PRIME MINISTER: Yes, we raise things through appropriate channels at every opportunity. And we’ll do so –
PARKER: This is the Chinese accusing us of being reckless and irresponsible international citizens.
PRIME MINISTER: But the contradiction is there in the statement themselves, where they confirm that we weren’t in their airspace, or indeed in international airspace. I’m not sure that the statement that was made by the Chinese government advances their position. I think it confirms ours.
###
Source: Office of the Australian Prime Minister
Speaker: The Hon. Anthony Albanese MP, Prime Minister of Australia
Format: Interview
China Policy Research 