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The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, says there is optimism that steel making will continue in his state, after the closure of a major blast furnace at Whyalla was announced yesterday.
Speaking to ABC News Breakfast from Whyalla and donned in some hi-vis, Malinauskas says there was disappointment, heartbreak, but also a sense of inevitability when the announcement was made.
[Whyalla] has the capacity to be a viable operation but it hasn’t been recapitalised. The blast furnace is over 60 years old. It was first built in 1965 and blast furnaces of this age not to be realigned on a frequent basis. This hasn’t been done in 20 years. The fact it’s still going is a miracle. We need to have the plant recapitalised and that’s exactly the plan we have in conjunction with the federal government … if we lose this capacity behind me, this country doesn’t have structural steel-making capacity and we can’t afford that.
There’s also retained optimism about the future of steel making in this country through that package, that $1.9bn package on the table as part of the sale process, which is why we’ve got…
