Australia's great leap forward: China opportunity makes Trump tariffs look like ‘a pimple on the bum of the iron ore trade'

The Age

14-07-2025

'I am a bit naughty,' says Stiesdal, whose renewable energy company, named after him, does business internationally including in Australia. 'Because I sometimes say that Australia behaves like a developing country. It sells raw products and buys them back as finished goods. You now have a chance to become more like a developed country.'
Albanese's meeting in Shanghai represents this chance. The eminent economist Ross Garnaut puts it into perspective: 'This trip is as important as Bob Hawke's trip to China in 1984 that set up the iron ore trade,' which went from a trickle to become Australia's single biggest export, worth $116 billion in the financial year just ended. 'It's the future of the Australian economy.' Garnaut was Hawke's economic adviser at the time.
The high drama of Donald Trump's tariffs on Australian exports are 'as a pimple on the bum of the iron ore trade,' Garnaut says. Trump's tariffs are high-risk but for another reason beyond Australia's direct trade with the US – they threaten to destabilise the world economy.
Bob Hawke's 1984 trip was important for China, too. The high-quality Australian grades of ore, replacing China's low grade domestic ore, were the feedstock that allowed China to become the world's dominant steel maker.
Today, China stands at a similar threshold. Beijing has decided that it will achieve net zero by 2060. The other big customers for Australian ore – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – have their own deadlines. 'They all know,' says Garnaut, 'that they have to get to green iron pretty quickly, or they won't get to net zero in time.'
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So why not make their own green iron? Because they don't have enough renewable energy of their own to achieve decarbonisation, and the cheapest and most feasible way of decarbonising their metals is to have it done in Australia. In China's case, the unfolding prospect is to import green iron from Australia, and then process it into green steel in China.
'There's not a snowflake's chance in hell that China won't send its cities green and its skies blue,' Fortescue Metals' founder, Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest, who's travelling with Albanese this week, said recently. 'They are determined. And that means that its fuel industry has to go green now,' Forrest told The Australian.
'And that's when I became really clearly determined – we've got to get a green metal industry off the ground in Australia. We've got to break through the cynicism.' Garnaut agrees: 'In a zero carbon world, we have to get beyond Hawke's 1984 breakthrough. Today shows that the necessary support is there from China.' Fortescue has pledged to produce green iron in Australia. BHP, Rio and Hancock will now have to decide whether they will do the same.
Because it's not just a matter of the bright prospect of Australia selling value-added iron ore, in the form of green iron, to China. It's whether Australia can keep its existing iron ore business: 'We will lose the trade if we can't export the iron as metal,' warns Garnaut.
Beyond the Australian economy, the stakes are high for planetary conditions, too, according to Garnaut, author of the Garnaut Climate Change Review: 'This will determine whether the world will deal with climate change and whether it can achieve net zero greenhouse emissions.'
And Australia has so much cheap renewable energy that it could supply China with its green iron needs by devoting just half of 1 per cent of its surface area to solar panels, and another half a per cent to wind turbines, according to a paper by The Superpower Institute, which was co-founded by Garnaut. And, by replacing conventional iron smelting in China with renewables smelting in Australia, we'd cut total global carbon emissions by 4 per cent, according to the institute.
This is why, 10 years ago, Garnaut seized on the vision of Australia's low-carbon 'superpower' opportunity. Today it's considerably closer than it was a week ago.