Whyalla Steelworks

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:32): My question is to the Premier. Will the Premier guarantee that not one person at the Whyalla Steelworks will lose their job following it entering administration?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:33): I want to say—and the Leader of the Opposition knows this—it has been painful to witness that people have been losing their jobs in Whyalla now for a while. The member for Giles, who is on his way up to Whyalla, has facilitated for me to be able to meet people who have been directly affected in such a way. Because it is not strictly a one-employer town but a one-industry town that is so dependent upon a single enterprise, there are a lot of people who have already lost their jobs. What we've got to do is try to stem that; we've got to try to stop further job losses happening into the future.

Businesses, as they evolve, make their own decisions about how much labour they employ, particularly non-government enterprises, which this is, but what we've got to do as a government is get our policy settings in place to maximise the likelihood of as many people being in work as possible. The administrator has assured the government that it will have no plans to make people lose their jobs in the immediate future. They've got to get in there and stabilise the business.

As I have said in the parliament recently, at the moment, as it stands, as steelmaking production ramps up, there has actually been more demand for labour than there has been supply. There is overtime happening at the steelworks, so we have every confidence that the workers of the business itself are in a good position.

The bigger issue is about how we can stop the redundancies happening from contractors who are critical to the operations of the steelworks. When they are not getting paid, when their debts are not getting paid, of course they have been making tough decisions to let people go—people who are the owners of really unique skills that are critical to the ongoing operations of the business—and that has all been compromised.

I guess that's what precipitated the action, which in some respects goes back to the Leader of the Opposition's very first question today. The state government was in receipt of advice that says, the way things are going, they are getting so bad that it could end up arriving at a point where it becomes irredeemable. If we allow that to transpire, we would look back on this moment and say, 'Why didn't we act sooner?'

That's not to say that acting now isn't without risks. I speak plainly about this to the Leader of the Opposition and the people of South Australia more broadly: this is a wicked problem. Wicked problems rarely have a suitable solution that solves everything, so there are going to be challenges in front of us. There is no doubt about that. There are no absolute guarantees of anything in these circumstances, except to say that, with the advice that we had received from the Steel Task Force, we know that the path that we are now on provides a greater degree of certainty for everyone in Whyalla than the path we were on before under the ownership of GFG, and that's the point.

Does this path guarantee an absolutely perfect outcome? No more or less than any other path. But it does provide more certainty than the one we were on this morning, and that's why we have made the decision we have. It's not an easy call to make. This is a government doing this; it is not one business to another. This is a government doing it, which makes it unique in its circumstances. But it speaks to the responsibility that we feel to not sit back and just be another creditor, to not sit back and just observe. We are different. We have a different responsibility and a different power to respond to it, so that is what we have done, and we fundamentally believe it's the right thing to do.