Will 2025 be remembered as the year of the bailout?

More than $3bn of taxpayer money has been committed to propping up the country’s hugely power-hungry metal making and smelting industries.

So far, the support has been alarmingly ad-hoc .

A foreign-owned smelter says it will shut its doors and layoff its workers without taxpayer help, and the government, state or federal, duly obliges.

A $2.4bn rescue package for the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia in February kicked off the trend.

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The steelworks are now in the final stages of a sales process that may involve taxpayers taking a stake in a business with an uncertain future.

Amid a global mood for more industrial intervention, more taxpayer handouts are surely to come.

Head of the Grattan In

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