I'm not disagreeing with the goal but we have some pretty fucked working conditions here. Picking stands out, fucking messed up industry.

Especially since the raw materials for grid scale storage are almost all mined in Australia, mass packaged into batteriy cells in China, then bought back. Australia could absolutely move up the value chain on these if it wanted to and the government put investment into it, but that would require the best nation in the world for solar to stop trying to subsidize fossil fuels at every opportunity.

China even gives you a clear step by step example of how to do it. Just take the billions they are trying to make contingent on nuclear and instead use it to provide a minimum order guarantee for LFP and Sodium Ion cells.

If you realy wanted to commit, you could join up with Chile and Argentina, all agree to build battery plants, then raise export tariffs on the raw stuff and become OPEC but with three quarters of the worlds battery production instead.

It is absolutely possible for the largest supplier of lithium in the world to package it into battery cells instead of just selling it raw, and all that it would take is the smallest bit of future planning and not outright bowing down to a dead end industry, which of course means that it’s never going to happen and the government will continue to prop up coal, petrol, and gas while its citizens continue to buy back actually useful energy infrastructure from China.

Many of these initiatives have to be set in train now to gain the benefits in five or ten years’ time

It's longer than an election cycle, so we can't start it or the other mob might be in government when it's completed and they take the credit.