BP and Tombie, all well and good quoting a great concept that didn’t happen for whatever reason, but cast your mind back 20-30 years ago. We had a steel mill in Whyalla with iron ore coming from just around the corner at Iron Knob, Iron Baron etc. We had a steel mill in Newcastle with coal just over the river in the Hunter Valley.
The steel industry (BHP) was split up in the late 90’s, with disastrous effect. I worked in the industry for 25years and watched my company drop the ball. Fabrication firms started buying ‘cheap’ steel from china and putting up with poor quality, initially. This left the mills with expensive (compared to the Chinese stuff) unsold steel in their holding yards which gradually got more and more surface rust on it, requiring additional labour (from the fabricators) to prepare it ready for a finished product. Gradually the quality from China improved, until the 00’s saw more than 50% of fabricators buying steel products from steel distributors whose primary supplier was in China, followed by tubular products and merchant bar (flat bar, round bar etc).
They are gone now. I don’t know if any of the mills are still operational, including the scrap metal mill at Rooty Hill. Like the car industry, we did it to ourselves with consumers purchasing from suppliers based on the best price. This forced the suppliers a to look elsewhere for a product that was competitive.
