You’ve heard me say it before: Labor’s Net Zero obsession is killing Australian industry.

This week I saw it up close with Ben Small, the Liberal Member for Forrest, outside the Albemarle lithium plant in Kemerton, WA.

Two hundred and fifty local jobs are now gone with the plant mothballed due to ‘operating costs’.

Along with those jobs, we’ve also lost a critical link in Australia’s supply chain.

If you live in WA, you might know someone who worked there.

My message today: when our energy is expensive and unreliable, heavy industry can’t survive in Australia.

And when a plant like Albemarle shuts, it puts a big hole in our local community and economy.

Wages are lost. Local businesses lose customers. Family budgets are torn up.

I also visited the now defunct Alcoa alumina refinery in Kwinana.

For decades it turned WA bauxite into alumina—an important link in our Australian supply chain.

Now it’s closed, and a thousand families have borne the brunt of that decision.

But there’s a bigger issue at stake.

If Australia wants to be a resilient country, we can’t just dig up dirt and ship it overseas. We also need to build our industrial complexity, and add value throughout the supply chain.

For that, we need cheap and abundant energy.

That means we can mine, refine, process, and build here at home—as we have done before.

But that doesn’t mean we must return to the industrial past.

The AI revolution and robotics offer new ways of building our supply chains and advanced manufacturing capability in Australia.

We can use technology to increase our productivity and national competitiveness.

That requires vision and leadership.

And it requires a policy framework that backs Australian industry, not burdens it.

It must be a national priority for government.

For that we must focus on the fundamentals of supply: cheaper energy, lower input costs, and sound incentives to attract the investment we need in our strategic industries.

If you’ve been hit by closures or rising energy costs, I want to hear from you.

Your story matters—and it helps us build a plan that rebuilds Australia’s industrial muscle and supply chains.