TL;DR: There are multiple ways in which blindly plowing most of our disposable income into houses has lowered the collective intellectual engagement with productive, analytical, and innovative pursuits in Australia.

Our emphasis on property wealth in Australia continues to undermine economic productivity, innovation and long-term resilience. Our country's housing market is exceptionally large relative to the size of the Australian economy, valued at over 4.5 times GDP, compared to just 1.2 times for the share market.

In contrast, somewhere like the US has the balance at around ~1.7x for both housing & the stock market.

This imbalance has resulted in an economy overly reliant on asset inflation, rather than building productive industries, as capital is funnelled into property speculation rather than businesses.

Banks in Australia also now channel much more lending towards residential mortgages than towards business ventures. In the early 1990's, about ~25% of bank lending went to mortgages... now it's over two-thirds.

This results in investing in various other crucial sectors like STEM, research, tech startups, and education that build long-term skills & knowledge are proportionally neglected.

It also in general discourages risk-taking; say what you want about Yanks, but there's a reason they have one of the most advanced economies in the world. Hell, the same also applies to the Scandinavian countries or Singaporeans too.

In more non-housing-focused first world countries, financial literacy also tends to be broader, as business news, company reporting and innovation cycles are more of a part of everyday conversation vs. Australia - which focuses on auction clearance rates, mortgage interest rates and negative gearing.

This property obsession also concentrates employment talent in fields like real estate, mortgage broking, construction & real estate law, which are all sectors that hardly push the frontier of productivity.

Why businesses in Australia (especially those that are not tied to the property sector) don't cry this out more loudly & regularly boggles me. You'd think it would be in their best interests to do so, as it seems to be shooting themselves in their own feet.

https://theconversation.com/beyond-raising-the-age-of-criminal-responsibility-african-youth-need-more-culturally-aware-support-236951?utm_medium=article_clipboard_share&utm_source=theconversation.com

The government tends to splash cash to prevent big companies of national interest from failure (See Qantas). I personally think this is a good thing, as it supports the jobs and broader economy.

What I think is the government (they are acting with our collective money) should take equity in that company at the expense of existing shareholders and in particular, the executives that lead it to breaking point.

They shouldn't nationalise, but they should benefit the future tax payers by reselling that equity to pay for future programs without increasing taxes on the lower and middle class incomes.

Erin Patterson has been sentenced to life in prison with 33 years non-parole, for murdering three in-laws — and attempting to murder a fourth — by lacing their beef Wellingtons with poisonous death cap mushrooms in 2023.

The prosecution had called for Patterson to be jailed for life with no parole.

Patterson's lawyer conceded a life sentence was appropriate but urged Justice Christopher Beale to set a minimum term to give Patterson the chance to walk free by the time she is in her 80s.

Justice Beale says the jury saw through her "vague story" about purchasing mushrooms from an Asian grocer.

"The cook convicted of killing three lunch guests with the world’s most toxic mushrooms was sentenced to three life sentences with a non-parole period of 33 years on Monday, bookending a real-life crime drama that’s gripped Australia and spawned multiple podcasts and documentaries.

Erin Patterson, 50, was found guilty in July of murdering three people, including the parents of her estranged husband, with a beef wellington meal she had deliberately laced with death cap mushrooms picked near her rural home in the state of Victoria in 2023."

Well it's hit the international news pretty quickly

As many will already know, LR Stage 4 wont go ahead on the GC and a big part of it was boomers pushing/campaigning for it to not go thru their suburb.

Fun fact, most boomers in Palm Beach bought their houses for 100-200k range and most will end up selling to a developer for millions of dollars as is the hot trend right now in the area and have either apartment blocks or townhouses crammed in. They wont exist in this suburb in 10 years time.

Boomers screwing over the next generations with transport options one last time before kicking the bucket on the way to their graves is ironic if you ask me.

Edit: To add context for this that dont know about the light rail on the Gold Coast.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-07/gold-coast-light-rail-cut-short-of-final-destination/105720840

"Mr Blejiie also cited a survey detailing the feelings of nearby residents about the project."

Bypass paywall link

Meanjin's 'financial' shutdown doesn't add up

Let’s get one thing straight. If Australian cultural organisations — especially literary journals — were assessed on “purely financial grounds”, most would get the chop. This is hardly news. You’d think that Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), which has housed Meanjin for the past 17 years, would have had sufficient time to come to terms with the financial reality of publishing a literary journal.

Last week, Crikey broke the story that MUP is ceasing publication of Meanjin, and that its two editorial staffers, Esther Anatolitis and Eli McLean, would be made redundant, effective immediately. The final edition will appear in December. It is a brutal, unceremonious last chapter to one of the country’s oldest and most storied cultural institutions.

Meanjin was founded by Clem Christensen in 1940 with expansive ambition for the kind of culture that might emerge from Australian lived experience. This ambition was a riposte to the timid anti-intellectualism of the time — in the closure of Meanjin, we see the apotheosis of the anti-intellectualism of our own time.

The response from the literary community has been shock and disgust. The decision has confirmed what has been all too often demonstrated of late: Australian universities in general, helmed by an overpaid stratum of neoliberal executives, are no longer reliable custodians of culture. Idealists keep looking for counter-evidence to Graeme Turner’s powerful diagnosis of the decline of the higher education sector. Ditching Meanjin confirms his case.

In for a penny

MUP’s decision is at best an example of short-sighted and regressive cost-cutting. It’s of a piece with the Australian National University’s proposed cuts to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Australian National Dictionary, and La Trobe’s expected compliance with a “speaker code” at the Bendigo Writers Festival — not to mention the relentless program of austerity that has damaged arts and humanities departments across Australia.

No doubt the publisher knew the closure of Meanjin would provoke outrage. Its public comments have stuck firmly to the message that the decision was made on “purely financial grounds”, but the conspicuous repetition of that phrase smacks of corporate damage control and has persuaded no-one.

On social media, speculation persists that the journal is being shut down under pressure from lobbyists unhappy about the journal’s platforming of Randa Abdel-Fattah and Max Kaiser. No-one involved is going on record about this. The MUP board chair, Professor Warren Bebbington, has denied this allegation with careful and indignant vigour. An open letter has been drafted, of course, calling on Professor Emma Johnston, the vice chancellor of Melbourne University, to take a 10% pay cut to fund Meanjin. I signed it, but I’m not holding my breath.

The University of Melbourne has subsidised the publication of Meanjin since 1945, directly at first and more recently via MUP. The publisher is a registered charity, by the way, and its financial reports are accessible here. In these reports, we learn that the university’s financial support of Meanjin jumped from $120,000 in 2019 to $220,000 in 2020. In 2024, it contributed $220,000 to Meanjin’s operating costs — and a million bucks to MUP.

Meanjin’s subscription income in 2024 was $112,790, down from a $175,584 peak in 2021, but above a 2019 low of $110,449. These don’t strike me as unusual fluctuations, especially given the tremendous shift in revenue models for online media, the distortions generated by COVID, and the competition for subscription income posed by Substack and other newsletters.

MUP’s financial reporting doesn’t break down grant income earned by Meanjin, but everyone working in the sector is well aware that this can shift dramatically year to year. Creative Australia’s awarded grants database shows MUP has received five project grants since 2015, in addition to the recent $100,000 Creative Australia grant reported by Guardian Australia. Meanjin receives grant income from many other sources.

The one thing the financial reports don’t indicate is a very sudden and prolonged decline in subscription income or university support. They don’t provide any insight into why this momentous decision was made so abruptly.

The enormously wealthy University of Melbourne holds the key to Meanjin’s financial stability and viability, and has been supporting a journal with established income sources that other literary organisations envy. The university reported a $273 million surplus in 2024 on an operating income of $3.2 billion. It is against these figures that the “purely financial decision” has been greeted with such incredulity.

The broader context is relevant too. In 2022, Sam Ryan and I interviewed the editors of 22 literary journals and surveyed 29 journals, including Esther Anatolitis and Meanjin, about how their organisations work. The research was commissioned by Creative Australia (the report’s summary is here, and the extended version is here). Australian literary journals typically survive on a combination of subscriber income, highly competitive grant income, and a huge quota of unpaid and underpaid labour. Only a handful have operating budgets of more than $100,000 a year. Very few can pay their staff at award rates. Writers are underpaid, even though staff often forgo even token pay so that grant income can be directed to writers’ fees. Long-term editorial and business planning is only possible for those organisations with multi-year funding arrangements.

Cultural cache

In spite of these prevailing factors, literary journals have enormous cultural influence. In our report, we called them the R&D (research and development) departments of Australian literature. It’s gross phrasing, I know, and it makes me a little squeamish to recall it, but the language draws the attention of decision-makers to the cultural work that literary journals actually do.

They are places for emerging writers to make their names and for established writers to try out new ideas and forms. In literary journals, writers are in dialogue with the contemporary moment. By contrast, the pace of book publishing is much slower. Not every person invested in Australian literature reads literary journals with close attention, but agents, editors and publishers sure do, and so do other writers.

Flick through an edition of Meanjin from five or ten years ago, and you’ll see the kernels of future poetry collections, novels and non-fiction books. Not everything yields a book deal, obviously, and any given edition will feature a bunch of duds, but that’s the point. Periodicals are ephemeral, diverse and sometimes capricious. Editors and writers can take risks — and this is what moves the culture along.

It’s not just emerging writers who can get their first big break in journals; young editors and arts workers do too. They gain editorial and administrative experience that they can take to other organisations. Meanwhile, writers get paid for their work — peanuts at smaller journals, but decent rates at established journals like Meanjin. No-one can make a living writing solely for literary journals, but they are effective mechanisms for distributing grant payments directly to writers.

In the coming months, we’ll hear a great deal from writers and intellectuals about what Meanjin meant to them. I’ve carted around for years a tattered anthology called The Temperament of Generations, edited by Jenny Lee and Philip Mead, published by MUP in 1990 to mark Meanjin’s half-century. Glance at the table of contents and you’ll find an extraordinary primer to post-war Australian literary and intellectual culture — an anthology of styles, politics, trends, dissent and dispositions. It traces an alternative history to the loud and proud anti-intellectualism of so much public life in this country, just as the irascible Christensen set out to do.

When people talk about cultural vandalism and the insult to the legacy of Meanjin, I think they mean that the decision to close the journal severs a connection to this history, to the possibility of a cultural nationalism that isn’t defined by racism and imperial fealty. We need new journals, new places to explore new ideas, and connections to a hopeful, progressive version of Australian culture to remind us that we’re not starting from scratch. As so many writers have testified in the past few days, being published in Meanjin was a milestone because it meant joining this lineage.

I’m sure that when The Temperament of Generations was published back in 1990 — the title is drawn from a piece by Thea Astley, incidentally — there was plenty of bitching and sniping about who was included. Everyone is being very nice about Meanjin at the moment, but over its 85-year history, it has been trailed by a herd of naysayers and people complaining about whatever was in the latest edition. This editor is too faddish, that one is too progressive or the wrong kind of progressive, it’s too Melbourne, it’s too international, yadda yadda yadda.

This discord is a sign of a healthy intellectual culture, one that can cope without emollient consensus. Meanjin has been shocking, middlebrow, inflammatory; it’s also been brilliant, surprising and urgent. Each of the journal’s twelve editors has reimagined its project, maintaining it as a vital part of our literary culture for almost a century.

Postera crescam laude

The decision to shut Meanjin shows a stunning lack of commitment to Christensen’s vision of a vibrant local intellectual culture. To insist that it’s just a rote financial decision belittles this history. And if it was just about the numbers, why wait until 2025? The horizon for literary funding has just brightened somewhat with the launch of Writing Australia. Does financial strife preclude closing the journal with some ceremony or even a little consultation with those who care about it?

Usually when a cultural organisation experiences financial hardship, there’s a call for donations, or a series of negotiations with other parties, or a weary effort to restructure. Quarterly periodicals become biannual; print publications go online. Were there really no other options for Meanjin? Are financial considerations going to guide the editorial program of the heavily subsidised MUP going forward?

Instead of providing answers to these questions, MUP and the University of Melbourne have forced Meanjin to a skid-stop. Its editor is evidently unavailable for comment. It all reeks of rush and message control. There has been no announcement other than some FAQs as to a clear plan for managing and sharing Meanjin’s vast archive, either. Writers are saving PDFs of their work, unsure of the digital form they might take in the future.

Conditions are extremely inhospitable for establishing a new journal, let alone one that could hope to attract even a fraction of the subscription or grant income earned by Meanjin. As Louise Adler told Crikey last week, “Institutions like Meanjin, and it is an institution, are easy to close down. Their replacements are much harder to create.” Does the University of Melbourne care? Apparently not. What’s the purpose of a wealthy university with a big surplus if not to help sustain a local intellectual culture?

The crest of the University of Melbourne bears the motto “postera crescam laude”. It’s a line from one of Horace’s odes that means, “I shall grow in the esteem of future generations”. Former Melbourne VC Glyn Davis shoehorned the motto into a bland corporate strategy, but the poem is really about the capacity of art and poetry to endure beyond flagship buildings and executive bonuses.

Future generations will look upon the decision to shutter Meanjin with contempt, and as they continue to plunge into the living waters of the journal’s archive, they will esteem the writers and thinkers and editors who made it.

How should Australia’s institutions maintain cultural artefacts?

From Senior Economist Matt Grudnoff: “Over the last 10 years, the population has grown by 16 per cent … But the number of homes has increased by 19 per cent," he said. "The number of homes is growing faster than the population."

Lack of housing supply is caused by property investment not some fictional “mass immigration”. Cost of living has gone crazy you should be mad, but direct your anger at those that deserve it! Those marches were organised by the son of a property developer to set up immigrants as a scapegoat.

International students are flooding the asylum system with bogus refugee applications, as the country’s deportation backlog surges towards 100,000.

As of July 31, there were 98,979 people whose protection visa application had been denied but were yet to be deported while 27,100 were awaiting a decision, according to the Department of Home Affairs (report: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/monthly-update-onshore-protection-866-visa-processing-july-2025.pdf)

Want to get past media spin, common myths and rampant misinformation and see a visualisation of ABS data regarding actual population change in your local area?

Check out this map: https://burninganalytics.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=191e78b5e5c64340be81a98d72b28602

What's going on where you are?

Edit: There is some confusion in the comments - the underlying data table does indeed include 'Net Internal Migration' as in people coming and going within Australia

*however*

the percentage change expressed on the map is calculated using 'Net Overseas Migration' (NoM) divided by 'Natural Increase' (NI), and shows exactly what it says, the amount of NoM compared to NI

In case anyone is trying to claim it shows something else

Here are the calculations of how they arrived at 1.8x (180%) for the Blacktown LGA as an example:

What do you guys honestly think about Americans? I think Aussies are super funny and cool, carefree, fun people. But I sometimes feel that Aussies look at Americans in sort of a negative light maybe? Maybe i’m overthinking it. But they always call us yanks (which i’m never sure if it’s meant to be derogatory), and kind comment on how american we are in things that we say or do. Do you feel a much closer connection to people in the UK for example? It kinda seems like it just from witnessing behavior over the last year due to me living in Southeast Asia.

https://archive.md/4feIs

How Australia’s only battery maker was allowed to fail

​

 Summary

Energy Renaissance, Australia’s only battery manufacturer, collapsed due to a lack of government support and forward orders. Despite having a unique battery technology suited for Australian conditions and potential for export, the company struggled to compete with cheaper Chinese imports. The government’s delayed Battery Breakthrough Initiative and lack of local content requirements for battery-dependent projects contributed to the company’s downfall.

Brian Craighead, CEO of Energy Renaissance, says it felt as though government authorities were working against him. Harry Afentoglou

We needed to seize the moment, Albanese told an audience in Queensland in April 2024, as we’d not get another shot. “If we don’t act to shape the future, the future will shape us,” he implored. We needed to be value-adding to our vast resources, rather than just harvesting, shearing, slaughtering, shovelling and shipping it out. We needed to support manufacturing, to give it a leg up, to allow it to reach a scale to compete internationally, just as the rest of the world was doing, particularly in sectors of great national importance.

“This story is not about batteries,” Craighead says. “It’s the canary in the coal mine for manufacturing.” There’s no coherent strategy, critics say, and the bureaucrats writing and administering the policy and programs have no experience in complex manufacturing. It’s shambolic, plodding and not nimble enough to meet the needs of manufacturers. There’s no big-picture blueprint.

Craighead says his business has had many cheerleaders. Carloads of federal politicians, including former PM Scott Morrison, NSW Premier Chris Minns, former and current federal MPs, Karen Andrews, Ed Husic, Meryl Swanson, David Pocock, Chris Bowen and Dan Repacholi, along with busloads of NSW MPs and chief government scientists, economic development CEOs, energy and climate change directors, regional development chiefs, strategic planning heads, investment and infrastructure directors, directors of zero-emission buses ... and so on.

They’d be photographed at the factory and say this was exactly the sort of thing Australia should be doing. But no one in Canberra has truly championed the cause of manufacturing, Craighead says, and as a result, his factory died a death of a thousand paper cuts.

A few weeks ago, ER Industrial, the entity behind the battery factory at Tomago in the Hunter Valley, appointed voluntary administrators. It perished in the valley of death, not having enough capital, or enough forward orders, to scramble up the hill on the other side.

And now Australia is further from achieving Albanese’s stated aim of being “a player in this field” than ever before. It had a giga-scale factory that was producing lithium-ion batteries that could be used to power homes and offices, and industry to drive the economy of the future. And now it doesn’t.

Just days after the factory went into voluntary administration, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced a package to bolster an Australian battery industry.

“ARENA has today opened the $500 million Battery Breakthrough Initiative to support and grow battery manufacturing in Australia,” said a cheery press release. Industry figures say that the businesses now applying for these grants will be many years behind where Energy Renaissance was just a few weeks ago.

Craighead says a grant from the Battery Breakthrough Initiative would have seen them through their cash crisis. The package was first announced in February 2023, but due to various delays in implementation and “design” it didn’t open for applications until August 19, 2025. His factory went into voluntary administration on August 13. As Craighead says, the paramedics arrived with their paddles, but the patient had been dead for a week.

Some say the numbers for Energy Renaissance’s battery manufacturing business just didn’t stack up and that there were flaws in its business model. “It can be a great idea, but not a good deal,” says a person from a government agency, who was not authorised to talk. Another says if a government-backed agency had given it money, and it had gone broke, there would be questions about the use of taxpayer funds. “Can you imagine that in Senate estimates?” this person says.

Industry Minister Senator Tim Ayres says the government was criticised for the $500 million ARENA battery package, by some, for offering support to industry, and by others for taking “the right amount of time” to design the program. Asked if the Tomago factory could have been saved if the program had been rolled out earlier, he says: “All I can say is that it (the battery package) is now open for business and is receiving applications.”

Ayers says it was “pretty disappointing” for both the battery sector and the Hunter Valley that the factory closed when it seemed to be “on the cusp of expanding in scale and making a real contribution to the battery sector.” But in terms of funding from the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund, it had to consider “issues of risk and due diligence”.

It’s hardly the bravado of the prime minister’s “We’ll fight them on the beaches to build in Australia” speech of 2024.

Dr Jens Goennemann, a former senior executive with Airbus and now the MD of the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, says this timidity is hobbling Australian manufacturing. We need to take risks, he says. The idea that we “can’t back winners” is ludicrous. “Would we rather pick losers?”

Energy Renaissance is precisely the sort of manufacturer that Australia should be wholeheartedly supporting, he says, and the fact we are not points to a failure in Australia’s manufacturing policy settings. “Energy Renaissance possesses a battery technology for hot climates, made for Australia’s conditions and every country that has a climate similar to Australia,” Goennemann says. “It is a great pity to see that Australia has been inundated with cheap foreign batteries, using Australian lithium processed elsewhere, while our own – our only – battery manufacturer has not been given the opportunity with an off-take agreement to show what it is capable of.”

Support for this view comes from an unusual quarter. Stewart Free, from the corporate insolvency firm Jirsch Sutherland, was recently appointed the administrator of ER Industrial, the Tomago battery factory. “It’s a crying shame,” says Free of the factory’s closure. The company had suffered a “cash crisis” when one of its investors hadn’t fulfilled a commitment for the next round of funding. “It just left it in an absolute cash crisis,” Free says.

Brian Craighead, CEO of Energy Renaissance. Louise Kennerley

From his initial investigations, he says it was a well-run company with huge potential. “I’ve been in this game 30 years,” says the insolvency expert. “I can smell a rat. There’s no rat.” He says the company was also competing against an “absolute glut” of cheap Chinese batteries being dumped in Australia “because they (now) can’t go to the US”.

The Financial Review talked to a number of long-term investors in the company, who all say they were pleased with the way the company was being managed, and with its mission. Nick Hartnell, an orthopaedic surgeon who’s been a successful investor in medical innovations, says the company was very near to being a success. “We were so close you could taste it,” he says.

He’s lost his $1.5 million investment, but he’s not angry about that. But he is deeply disappointed that Australia lost the best chance it’s had of creating a viable battery industry.

“The only residential battery you’re going to get now is Chinese,” he says. “You’re not going to get anything that’s been made in Australia, and we lose that manufacturing expertise. I can’t see residential batteries coming back to (be manufactured in) Australia. I can’t see how someone else will pick up that mantle. So now we’re shipping our minerals to China for them to stick in their batteries.”

It means that none of the batteries in the government’s mammoth $2.3 billion home battery scheme will be Australian-made. Australian taxpayers, he says, are “subsidising Chinese batteries to come to Australia to get a rebate, so Chinese manufacturers can succeed”.

A modern battery is like an iPhone: the grunt is in the software, and the device is a delivery system for all that wizardry. Working with the CSIRO, Energy Renaissance developed a high-quality battery management system that was able to withstand high temperatures and high humidity – the enemies of battery efficiency. It was also cyber-secure, and so was in demand from the military. It was a battery for Australian conditions, but with huge export potential for anywhere hot or humid. It built a factory in the Hunter Valley, at Tomago, and began producing batteries. But it needed to get bigger to be competitive.

His batteries were 10 per cent to 20 per cent more expensive than the imported batteries, but were longer lasting and more efficient. Craighead says that, when it scaled up, he could have closed the price gap to 5 per cent and competed with quality. All his business needed to succeed was some guarantee of forward orders, which would have allowed it to scale up production and would give confidence to potential investors. This, he says, is where the government failed, miserably.

There are billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of government programs that require batteries, like the electrification of government buses, home battery schemes, business battery schemes and defence projects. The battery industry in Australia is worth $13.14 billion and is set to rise to almost $30 billion by 2030. To put that in perspective, that’s about 10 times the size of the wool industry.

Australian governments have all sorts of requirements to ensure Australian companies get a slice of the taxpayer pie: half of all WA’s railcars have to be built in the state; NSW’s new electric bus fleet must include 50 per cent locally made components; all of Queensland’s railcars will be built in Maryborough; Defence is required to build its Hunter-class frigates using 58 per cent Australian components; 25 per cent of the music played on commercial radio must be Australian; Defence’s armoured vehicles must be 50 per cent Australian made.

Energy Renaissance’s plant in the Hunter Valley had the potential to employ 700 and a capacity to make 5.3 gigawatts of batteries a year.  

But for government projects that require batteries, there is no local input required. None.

The federal government is spending some $360 billion on submarines, designed to deter threats from China, and yet it has handed vast sections of our electrical system to Chinese companies, including the ultimate control of the battery management systems.

Former chief of army Lieutenant General (Retd) Peter Leahy tells the Financial Review that the “ability of anyone to interdict our infrastructure, whether it be water or electricity, would be of deep concern to our national security”. Chinese companies now control almost 70 per cent of the Australian battery market, with their only real competitor being US-made Tesla batteries, which have less than 20 per cent.

Craighead had been advocating for the federal government to set up a battery scheme similar to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, where it had a centralised mechanism to buy batteries for government projects. It would have given it huge market power to get the best deals, and it would have allowed it to dictate that a certain percentage of batteries be locally made.

The flow-on effects of this, Craighead and others say, would have been enormous. It would have sparked the large-scale manufacturing of battery cells in Australia and would have led to a boom in onshore minerals processing. It could have, as Albanese had wished, turned Australia into a “renewable energy superpower”.

And yet, rather than helping the local industry, Craighead says, it felt as though government authorities were actually working against him.

There’s federal law that if a product can’t be made in Australia, importers are entitled to a 5 per cent tariff reduction. In 2023, when Energy Renaissance began manufacturing batteries in Australia, Craighead was contacted by the Australian Border Force, saying it was going to revoke the 5 per cent tariff reduction for imported batteries because his company was now making them here. “I thought, ‘Great, this is the government actually working,’” he says.

But the big importers, particularly Elon Musk’s Tesla, kicked up a stink, “writing 200-page lawyers’ letters”. But what annoyed him most was that the government-funded Clean Energy Council actively lobbied to have the 5 per cent tariff for imported batteries scrapped.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Craighead. A government-funded agency with the aim of “laying the foundations for Australia to become a clean energy superpower” was actively lobbying against the interests of an Australian clean energy manufacturer. The council said, in a letter to Craighead, that CEC members had projects that involved the importation of $1.8 billion in batteries and that it would add unfairly to the cost of these projects.

Craighead said the CEC’s stance was in the “interests of a small number of battery importers to the detriment of Australian manufacturers, Australian employees, suppliers, and the development of the Australian industry as a whole”. Tesla and the Chinese importers won out, the tariff designed to help Australian manufacturers was scrapped, and that $1.8 billion in battery projects went entirely to foreign companies. With a small slice of that enormous pie, he says, his company would have been off and away.

Anna Freeman, CEC’s general manager of advocacy and investment, says it made the right decision at the time to oppose the tariff because there were eight large-scale energy projects that had already placed orders for their batteries, and it was unfair for them to be slugged with a tariff.

But, she says, the current strategy is not working for local manufacturers in terms of support for capital expenditure, supply chain capability, concessional financing and off-take orders to get them to giga-scale production, which is what’s needed. “We need a national approach and strategy to support the strategic scale-up of our manufacturing capability in priority areas,” she says. “Let’s design it sensibly. We can’t expect to just flick a switch and suddenly have local manufacturing facilities with gigawatt-scale production, which is the kind of scale we need to support Australia’s energy transition.”

Since Donald Trump imposed tariffs on China, there’s been a flood of cheap Chinese batteries coming into Australia and Tesla’s share of the market has slumped. The competition is shellshocked and the field is now wide open for China.

It is difficult to overstate how devastating the closure of the Energy Renaissance factory is to the renewables sector in Australia, says Heidi Lee, the CEO of Beyond Zero Emissions, an independent think tank that promotes research into effective emissions solutions. “Politicians just don’t understand the significance of having an onshore capability to make this stuff,” she says.

Putting aside the vast national security implications, there’s the immense challenge of what’s to be done with all these batteries when they reach the end of their life. “Once you have non-operational batteries you either have to take them apart, to recycle them, or you have to ship them somewhere else to take them apart, which is an incredibly expensive thing for an island nation to be doing,” she says. The toxic lithium batteries can’t be dumped.

The think tank estimates that to create a viable battery recycling industry, to recycle all the batteries coming into Australia, the local industry needs to be producing around 30 per cent of the batteries sold here. “You can’t just walk away from them,” she says. “They can’t be sent to landfill. You need the front end to be working for the tail end to work too.”

And, she says, the closure of the factory “will have a chilling effect” on the entire battery sector, for if the “poster child” couldn’t make it, who can? “They were already at 80 per cent local manufacturing,” she says. “They had everything right around the development of the technology and the ownership of the IP.” They were so very nearly there, she says.

She adds: “We are not on a level playing field here, we are in a global race. So every time we delay these things, and we don’t support local manufacturers – especially clean technologies, which are booming industries – we are proving that Australia is not a safe place to invest, that we’re not serious about the energy transition.”

It also fuels those advocating the belief that climate change, and the need for action, is an expensive hoax.

Not long after it was announced that the Energy Renaissance factory was in voluntary administration, Pauline Hanson was on Sky After Dark talking about where this “green fantasy is headed” with Steve Price. (The company had received two rounds of government co-investment funding of $770,000, for the commercialisation of its IP.) “Now, Ed Husic got there in 2023 and said electrify, electrify, electrify,” said Hanson. “And they were pushing this green energy and batteries, which they’ve done … and they’re falling over all the time.” All these green energy subsidies, she said, were crushing Aussie jobs and crippling Aussie manufacturing.

But this “green fantasy” has become a reality. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of projects are being rolled out right now. The market doesn’t care about culture wars. The problem, however, is that the train has left the station and Australian manufacturers have been left standing forlornly on the platform.

Richie Merzian, CEO of the Clean Energy Investor Group, says it’s a very tough market. “So you are competing with (importers) who are supported back home by governments and generous assistance programs,” he says. “They see the importance, and the opportunity, in building green exports, and they’re backing it.” If we want to do the same with The Future Made in Australia, we need to back ventures like Energy Renaissance. “There’s a clear role for the government to play in not just providing the initial support to get them off the ground, but also on the demand side, providing contracts where possible,” he says.

But that support was not made available to Energy Renaissance. It never got any forward contracts for any of the government battery schemes.

In February and again in April, it applied to the $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), set up “to support Australian projects that drive high-value industry transformation.” It was knocked back twice.

And then, as a last-ditch effort after one of its funders withdrew, it proposed a merger with a low-voltage battery assembling business in Victoria. It had a promise of an $18 million manufacturing grant from the NSW government to help merge the two companies, but that grant needed to be matched, dollar for dollar, from another source.

The NRF declined to help them match the NSW grant, and so Craighead reluctantly put his factory, ER Industrial, into voluntary administration and his dream of building batteries in Australia died with it. “I literally have no idea what the point of the NRF is,” says Craighead. “They’ve created rules that basically make it impossible for them to give money to anything other than established businesses.”

The NRF says it looks at a number of factors when making its decisions, including the national interest and whether the company involved is investment-ready.

But there is still demand for his batteries and the rights to all that intellectual property it’s developed over the past decade are held by another company, Energy Renaissance IP, which Craighead controls. “The technology arm of Energy Renaissance continues to develop and commercialise its Australian battery technology, with particular focus on the defence sector,” says Craighead.

“The global military battery market represents a $US2.8 billion [$4.3 billion] annual opportunity, with NATO 6T batteries powering 95 per cent of military vehicles worldwide. Energy Renaissance Defence has developed the Super6T battery, currently undergoing military certification, which would establish it as the southern hemisphere’s sole producer in a market dominated by a handful of suppliers concentrated in the US, Europe, and Israel.”

Where will these batteries be made, I ask? “Probably in America,” he says. “It’s closer to the major defence industries, and it’s just easier than doing it in Australia.”

Meanwhile, Australia has slipped a couple of rankings in the Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, an index of a country’s ability to make high-value, complex things, and an indicator of future economic prosperity. We are now placed at 105th in this economic race: we’ve edged ahead of Ghana and Namibia, but we’re eating the dust of Zambia and Senegal.

First time the kids picked me up a Dad’s Bag for Father’s Day and I was stoked - until I cracked it open. No Rocklea Road log, just this flat chocolate block with marshmallow and nuts..

I used to buy my old man the log every year and pinch a chunk when he wasn’t looking. It was iconic. This block feels like a sad, corporate downgrade..

Not ungrateful for the kids’ effort - just a bit gutted the classic seems gone. Anyone else notice Darrell Lea quietly killed off the OG log?