You may remember Craig Emerson dancing and singing "Whalla Wipeout". The point he was trying to make was that the carbon tax wouldn't wipeout Whalla. It did.
In fact the prospect of a carbon tax is to blame for the wind down of our Alumina, Aluminium, Steel, oil refining and chemical manufacture business. All these businesses need to make continual investment to be world scale and use state of the art technology to remain competitive. Those investments are very large and are modelled over decades not the few years of a current government.
When modelling competing projects what does a modeller in a multinational corporation include for carbon tax? He knows that over the life of a project the ALP will be in power half the time and is committed to introducing the tax. Hence its a better proposition to invest elsewhere.
The cost of labour and construction in Australia are negative factors counterbalancing proximity to raw material. The huge swing factor is the incalculable risk of a carbon tax.
More important than the continuous shut down of Australian heavy industry is the lack of new industries coming.
