MEDIA RELEASE
16 September 2026
Australia is losing the businesses that make things, employ Australians and keep regional communities alive, and the permanent closure of Whyalla’s blast furnace is Labor’s most devastating warning yet.
Administrators confirmed this week that the furnace, offline since April, will never be relit. About 500 direct employees and more than 100 contractors will lose their jobs, cutting the workforce from roughly 1,700 to 1,200. The plant produces 75 per cent of Australia’s structural steel. The Albanese Government pledged $2.4 billion to Whyalla in February 2025.
Whyalla has been making steel since the second world war. BHP began mining iron ore in the Middleback Ranges from the turn of the twentieth century, and the first blast furnace was blown in in May 1941, turning out pig iron and shells while the shipyard next door launched HMAS Whyalla.
Eighty-five years on, the furnace will not be lit again.
“Whyalla did not fail overnight, and neither is the damage being done here,” Mr Wallace said. “Local business owners tell me the same three things every week. Their costs are up, the paperwork never stops, and Canberra keeps changing the tax rules from under them.”
The most recent ASIC figures show 14,011 businesses entered insolvency in 2025-26, and 47,728 since May 2022. That is about 30 a day. Construction has been hardest hit with 10,166 failures, followed by accommodation and hospitality on 6,356. In 2018-19, under the former Coalition Government and in the middle of the pandemic, the figure was 8,105, or 22 a day. Locally, yesterday Australian Off Road, a local success story manufacturing high end off-road caravans went into administration.
ABS data shows small business profits have fallen 15 per cent in real terms since the June quarter of 2022, with real company profits down 23.4 per cent over the same period. Behind those numbers are family businesses working longer hours, putting off investment, delaying the decision to hire and wondering how much longer they can keep the doors open.
From 1 July 2027 Labor will replace the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount with inflation indexation, and from 1 July 2028 a minimum 30 per cent tax will apply to realised gains and to trust distributions. The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia has warned that 210,000 small family businesses could face a higher tax burden.
“Every one of those insolvencies is a family, a payroll and a shopfront that is no longer there,” Mr Wallace said. “The Government’s answer is to take more, because it cannot control its own spending. Labor has allowed spending to run away, and now small businesses and working Australians are being asked to carry the cost through higher taxes, more charges and more regulation.”
Mr Wallace said Labor’s energy policy was compounding the damage for manufacturers and for the local builders who depend on Australian steel.
“Under Labor, we have seen the closure or bailout of the Whyalla steelworks, the Tomago aluminium smelter, Nyrstar’s Port Pirie and Hobart smelters, the Boyne Smelter, Glencore’s Mount Isa copper operations, the Boyer paper mill, Liberty Bell Bay and BHP’s Nickel West operations, all while Labor pursues a reckless net zero agenda,” Mr Wallace said.
“Manufacturers and heavy industry need cheap and reliable baseload power. Instead, they are fighting for survival under Labor’s radical climate targets while taxpayers are forced to foot billions of dollars in bailouts. So much for a Future Made in Australia.”
A Coalition Government led by Angus Taylor will axe Labor’s toxic taxes on small business, bring down power bills by scrapping net zero, establish a permanent $50,000 instant asset write-off for businesses with a turnover under $10 million, and expand access to capital gains tax concessions.
“This is now a national small-business emergency. Every closure means jobs lost, apprentices not taken on, local suppliers missing work and communities losing the businesses that hold them together,” Mr Wallace said.
“The people who run these businesses employ our neighbours, sponsor our sporting clubs and train our apprentices. They deserve a government that gets out of their way.”
[ENDS] Media Contact: Brendan West – 0402 556 646 – Brendan.west@aph.gov.au