A sovereign steelmaking capability is vital for Australia’s national security and resilience. Rex Patrick argues that nationalisation is the one path that gives an absolute guarantee for Whyalla.

What’s next for Whyalla? If you just read some of the recent news headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking the crisis is past.

Although the state of the Whyalla steelworks has been revealed as much worse than previously known, OneSteel administrators KordaMentha are pressing ahead to restore the facility as a going concern. Backed by federal and state government financial support, they’re actually hiring to fill the gaps in the workforce that had opened up as Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance ran the Whyalla plant into the ground.

According to the most recent briefings, KordaMentha has also received a dozen expressions of interest from potential buyers and they hope the steelworks and associated Middleback Range iron ore mines will be sold to a new operator by the end of this year.

So there’s an understandable surge in optimism in Whyalla that the steelworks have been saved.

I very much hope that’s true, but as SA Premier Peter Malinauskas admitted in March, “there are a million things that could go wrong along the journey because it’s complex, it’s a big enterprise [and] world steel markets are in a state of flux”.

It’s worth remembering that the legal duty of the administrator is to serve the interests of OneSteel’s creditors, that’s their primary goal. It’s not to serve any wider interests, even if that’s in the interests of Whyalla or the wider national interest.

Whyalla Steelworks must be upgraded if the 60-year-old plant is to be viable into the future. Despite repeated promises and billions of dollars of iron ore revenue, GFG never made the investment needed to transform the steelworks into a 21st-century industrial facility.

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