"I know an economic slam dunk when I see one," Industry Minister Tim Ayres told a Hunter business audience last week, defending the Tomago aluminium smelter rescue package.

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The "slam dunk" in question is a long-term, taxpayer-underwritten power deal for a facility that consumes roughly 10 per cent of NSW's electricity and can no longer survive rising power costs - costs, ironically, driven by the very renewables transition the government is now subsidising to save the smelter.

It follows the $2 billion Boyne Island package in November, the Whyalla steel rescue, and similar interventions for copper, zinc and lead.

A defining feature of the current Albanese government is its embrace of industrial policy. Its flagship Future Made in Australia agenda commits $22.7 billion over a decade to subsidising selected industries in the name of economic security and the energy transition.

The impulse to override the free market is not Labor's alone. Senator Matt Canavan, leader of the Nationals, rightly criticises Labor's picking of winners and losers in their net zero agenda. Yet his Patriot Agenda openly embraces protectionism.

To Canavan's credit, broad tariffs are less prone to the cronyism of hand-picked subsidies.

But the underlying logic is the same - Canberra still deciding which industries it deems critical to prop up.

The push for economic nationalism on the right rests on the narrative that the world is becoming more fractious: Pax Americana is fading and the Chinese state actively subsidises its industries to put ours out of business.

Australia, the argument goes, needs a manufacturing base to weather the geopolitical storm ahead. And in times like these, Andrew Hastie claims, no medal awaits those making a last stand for neoliberalism.

The sentiment is understandable, and the aspiration to produce more domestically is one most Aussies will get behind.

But the proposed remedy is insufficient and counterproductive. China matters at the........

© Canberra Times