Wednesday, 19 March 2025

Manufacturing sector

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (19:27): (1526) My adjournment matter for the Minister for Industry and Advanced Manufacturing – a minister who seems to want to do himself out of a job, actually – is about addressing the devastating impact the Victorian Labor government’s energy policies are having on our manufacturing sector. The most recent blow came just this month when Keppel Prince in Portland, our last wind turbine tower manufacturer, mothballed its operations. Unable to compete with subsidised Asian imports, this closure marks the latest victim of policies that prioritise ideology over industry.

Keppel Prince is only the latest in a string of failures. Oceania Glass in Dandenong, our only architectural glassmaker, collapsed on 3 March 2025, shedding 261 jobs. CEO Corné Kritzinger wrote on LinkedIn:

Australia lost another critical manufacturing capability – architectural float glass.

He noted:

The closure … was a quiet event, attended only by employees.

That is unlike its grand opening 51 years ago.

There was no media coverage, no public acknowledgment – most Australians remain unaware that an entire industry has disappeared from their own backyard.

Oceania Glass had a proud heritage serving Australia, having sold its very first glass in 1856 and being the last remaining architectural glassmaker in Australasia. Its glass graces iconic buildings like Parliament House, yet it could not survive Labor’s energy regime.

Kritzinger wrote:

Certainly, for us as glass manufacturers, there are no real current alternatives for glassmaking outside of natural gas or other carbon fuels …

High energy costs, up 25 per cent last year, crippled its 2000-tonne furnace, leaving us reliant on imported glass. Qenos, Australia’s sole plastics manufacturer, closed last year, its production halted by unsustainable energy bills. Redflow, a battery maker, failed in December, leaving customers with defective products and useless warranties. These are not isolated incidents. Victoria saw 223 manufacturing closures in 2024 alone, the highest in Australia – 223 businesses, thousands of jobs and critical capacity lost, all while Labor pushes for 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035, driving blackouts and unaffordable bills. Our $31 billion manufacturing sector employing 260,000 Victorians is being hollowed out, so the action I seek from the minister is a change of direction – that he stands up for his portfolio and actively advocates for his cabinet colleagues to rewrite Victoria’s energy strategy. This list of recent manufacturing closures is devastating.