Tomago

Just think about this for a moment.

Take the Tomago aluminium smelter in the Hunter, right? The biggest user of electricity in New South Wales.

10% of every megawatt of power in this state is consumed by Tomago.

10%.

And yet when the bright sparks came along and said we're going to have an aluminium industry, the state government didn't say, oh, well, you better build a power station and you've got to do it with this technology and you've got to have surplus from that to feed the rest of the grid, otherwise we're not going to give you a licence.

Yeah, good afternoon, Michael.

Just clarify that last point for me, if you could.

My understanding is that data centres aren't really like Tomago Aluminium or Blue Scope Steel.

This isn't part of the hydro.

This is the separate Tomago aluminium deal where $2.5 billion of taxpayers' funds has been guaranteed to keep the Tomago smelter open on the basis that the electricity, renewable electricity, was going to come from the Snowy Hydro.

That's not going to happen.

Not for several years beyond the date, which means they have to then find the electricity to keep Tomago going, and the taxpayers will pick up the extra cost.

Because once you're buying the electricity on the open market, up it goes.

So this is a nightmare.

where the cheap power is.

That's why there's aluminium smelters in Tomago, in the Hunter Valley, in Gladstone, Queensland.

The bauxite, the aluminium ore, it's all up in the north.

You've got to dig it up, break it down one step into alumina and ship it down literally halfway around the country.

Mm.

Tomago-

Mm.

-where we smelt, uh, aluminum.

Yeah.

Here we go.

Tomago admitted today that they had enjoyed running on coal for forty years, and we decided not to use coal to chase net zero, so now a thousand Australian manufacturing jobs look like they're gonna be lost.

It's not that people are gonna stop using aluminum and the smelter and the coal to do all that.

Most of these benefit, well, almost all of them benefit from power purchase agreements or almost all of them come from government entities of one sort and I guess that's the problem in New South Wales is that the government doesn't own any of those projects.

As you pointed out this week, the big utilities are on strike and until we hear from Snowy Hydro, if we ever do, about their mandate to sort of get the contracts in for Tomago, I'm not too sure when we're going to hear from anyone.

Meanwhile, the need for energy continues to become more evident.

Demand is up across the NEM year on year.

Just last week, another smelter was rescued to the tune of $200 million using taxpayer money shared between Tasmania and the federal government.

This year we've also rescued the Tomago smelter with a $2.5 billion bailout between the New South Wales and federal governments.

Rio's aluminium smelter in Queensland received a pil- $2 billion bailout between the state and federal government.

Let's not forget the $6 billion spent on the energy bill relief fund to help families and Australians with sky-high electricity bills.