Ian Verrender

You know, during the period when I think it was when the Labor government had imposed that price cap of, say, $12 a gigajoule, and particularly through the Ukraine crisis, I

think gas prices went to about $23 a gigajoule if you're a business trying to lock in long-term supplies.

So it was just uneconomical for most big industrial users.

And you're talking about smelters, you're talking about all sorts of massive uses of energy here.

But the urea example is just a great example of

where everything went wrong.

I mean, here we are, one of the world's biggest agricultural exporters.

So we have, there's a ready home market for fertiliser.

And we've got the key ingredient to make it as well.

So why wouldn't you be making it here for your own market and then exporting whatever's left over?

You've got the market and the ingredients.

I mean, it's a no-brainer really, isn't it?

And yet it went broke because they couldn't source the key material to make it.

Because, you know, urea is essentially nitrogen and hydrogen combined.

combined and you use nitrogen out of the air and hydrogen out of the out of the gas you combine that and bob's your uncle you've got urea and uh you know so there's all these other countries that can make it but we surely should have been the country making more than anybody else and exporting it and i mean you know you think the middle east is now a major producer of urea and this is where we're getting most of ours from there's not a lot of agriculture around that part of the world

It's a bit dry and, you know, so it's just extraordinary that that plant in, what is it, Gibson Island off in Brisbane, that it shut down at that point.

Until now, there's always been a real problem with trying to increase tax on miners.

And, you know, we saw that during the Gillard era when, you know, the tax on iron ore, which should have been, again, a no-brainer.

And even in the past few years, we've seen attempts to modernise the resources rent tax on petroleum.

Australia was a groundbreaker in doing that when Paul Keating as Treasurer introduced that.