Arrium

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:42): I rise today to talk primarily about the agreement that has been entered into between Arrium and the state government in relation to Arrium's harbour. It is one of those items that represents what I believe is good news for the state and good news for my region but, in saying that, it might well be that the benefits that accrue will be medium to long term. There will not be any short-term benefits, given the state of commodity prices.

Before going into some detail about the proposal, and the whole saga of port proposals in this state over recent years, I think it is important when flagging good news also to acknowledge that there is also some bad news tied up with my region at the moment, especially in the community of Whyalla. Last week, BGC, the largest of the contractors at the Middleback mines, laid off or identified the people who would be laid off in the coming weeks—another 125 people added to the people who have already been laid off at the mines in the Middleback—so that is certainly not good news.

Coming on top of that is Arrium's announcement that $100 million worth of cuts will be identified at the Whyalla steelworks in addition to the $60 million worth of cuts that have already occurred. It is a little bit hard to estimate how many jobs have been lost at the steelworks in the last year. It would probably be relatively low in terms of the overall employment base at the steelworks, but about 90 staff members, primarily, have lost their jobs there. There is no employment target associated with the $100 million worth of cuts, but it is clear that additional jobs will be lost at the steelworks. That is why the announcement about the Arrium harbour, and the agreement that has been entered into between Arrium and the state government about opening up the harbour and reaching its full potential, is such good news.

As members from my part of the world would know, and as the member for Flinders would know, there has been a whole range of harbour proposals in our area. At Port Lincoln, Centrex were at one stage going to move iron ore through the Port Lincoln harbour, and that was a deeply divisive push by Centrex at the time. Fortunately, I think, for the Port Lincoln community, Jim White, the late general manager of the Whyalla steelworks, took over as CEO at Centrex and decided that it would be a very bad fit to put iron ore through that very attractive community, and he focused on the Sheep Hill proposal just to the north of Lipson Cove. That was a far more sensible proposal, but of course it has not gone anywhere because of commodity prices.

Just to the north of Centrex, we had Cape Hardy with the Iron Road proposal; that is still clearly on the drawing board, and I understand that Iron Road will be submitting formal documentation to the state government for approval very soon. Cape Hardy, as one of a number of ports that have been proposed, was one that seemed to make more sense, with the potential to build a relatively short jetty into deep water and therefore capable of handling capesize vessels.

To the north of Cape Hardy and to the north of Cowell harbour we had the Lucky Bay transhipping proposal, which I did not think was a very sensible proposal for a whole range of reasons. I doubt very much whether it will get off the ground, but I have been wrong before. Then to the north of Lucky Bay we had OneSteel Arrium. With the exception of what went out of Outer Harbor through IMX, they are the only people to export iron ore over recent years out of South Australia. Over on the other side of the gulf is Port Pirie, with the on-again off-again proposal, and Bob Duffin.

Time expired.