Madeleine King is the economic queen bee when it comes to mining
Angry bees have taught Resources Minister Madeline King the value of staying calm and that good preparation and planning pay off in beekeeping as well as policymaking.
Angry bees have taught Madeline King the value of staying calm.
“When I’m in a sticky situation at work, I think ‘Could this be worse?’ What’s worse is standing in front of 30,000 bees. That really concentrates the mind,” she says.
King has been an amateur beekeeper for years alongside her career in politics, so the Minister for Resources and Northern Australia knows there can be always be a sting in the tail.
In Canberra, she’s had the sweet taste of success and angry critics buzzing around her head.
Green groups wanted her hide when the government unveiled its Future Gas Strategy last year, she’s crossed swords with BHP and provoked the “billions for billionaires” barb from opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor as the driving force behind production tax credits for the critical minerals sector.
King is much more realist than idealist compared with some of her cabinet colleagues and is the queen bee for Western Australia as the only cabinet representative from the resources-rich state that was so integral to Labor’s 2022 election victory.
In energy, she says, there can’t be a transition to next zero without increased gas supply; she wants new projects to come into production.
King supports Labor’s commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 but sees exports of both thermal and metallurgical coal continuing into the second half of the century. She refused to back calls for a moratorium on new coalmines even when in opposition.
The return of Donald Trump in the US presents another challenge for King, who has worked hard on building an Australia-US alliance on critical minerals supply chains.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has been part of that work as Australia’s ambassador to the US. He’s also a beekeeper with a hive at the new Australian embassy in Washington, but may be pressured to buzz off as the ambassador based on his past attacks on Trump.
What has beekeeping taught King besides the value of staying calm, and are there any parallels with politics?
“You have to concentrate on what you are doing at the moment. Sometimes it is just hard work and it’s hot and sweaty and you get stung,” she says.
“You learn a lot as you do it because, at first, we did make stupid mistakes. And there’s the whole idea of working together and working quickly and with focus.”
King says good preparation and planning pay off in beekeeping and policymaking.
“We’ll have a plan of action then go in and do the business with bees so we can have the least disruption possible and get back out again,” she says. “If you apply that to how you think about policies, it is lots of planning and leg work, having everything ready to go and do the job.”
It has been a tough spring and summer season for beekeepers around Perth, with honey production well down, and 2024 was a rough year in King’s electorate of Brand, which takes in the Kwinana industrial hub.
There were more than 1000 job losses as Alcoa moved to shut down its Kwinana alumina refinery and BHP mothballed its nickel refinery.
This came on top of BP shutting its oil refinery, where her father once worked, in 2021.
“It is really difficult because of the connection to the community. My dad worked at BP, and that’s why we live here. I went to school with some of the workers at Alcoa and the same with BHP Nickel West,” King says.
“It’s sad for the community but the prospects of employment are so high. Kwinana is going gangbusters on new industries.
“I’m not happy about it (the closures) but what does please me is I know those people are able to find work.”
Wesfarmers and its Chilean partner SQM are putting the finishing touches on a new lithium hydroxide refinery in Kwinana, and BHP, Rio Tinto, BlueScope and Woodside have teamed up on a green iron project next door to the closed nickel refinery.
The collapse of the Australian nickel industry last year led to heightened tensions between the government and BHP, which was outspoken in its criticism of Labor’s industrial relations changes.
Last May, King said BHP had put shareholder returns first in underinvesting in its ageing nickel infrastructure and thousands of workers could pay the price.
BHP hit back by releasing figures that showed it had invested $4.4bn from 2020 to increase mines and sustain operations. The mining giant eventually shut the nickel business pending a review in 2027 as Chinese-backed producers in Indonesia continue to flood the market with supply.
King says her so-called clash with BHP was blown out of proportion in the media. “We had lots of really productive meetings (with BHP), but we just couldn’t find a solution. I still deal with them all the time. We also have differences with BHP’s view on a number of things,” she says.
“Hopefully the nickel price does recover, but that’s going to be really difficult with the supply coming out of Indonesia,” she says,
King remains a big believer in production tax credits for onshore processing of critical minerals, despite the collapse of the nickel industry, the woes of lithium producers and commodity price pressures in rare earths.
She fought hard for the $7bn tax credit scheme for critical minerals that sits alongside $6.7bn for renewable hydrogen under Labor’s Future Made in Australia policy.
It stung that Taylor dismissed it as “billions for billionaires” as soon as the measure was announced in the past budget, and that the Coalition has not budged in its opposition. The Minerals Council of Australian has also taken pot shots at the policy.
“It’s hardly a payout to billionaires. We want people like Gina Rinehart to invest in these projects because they are really challenging. A credit only comes with the production and processing of critical minerals,” King says. “We want that to happen. If (billionaires) are putting their money on the line, that’s a good thing because the public purse can’t afford all this but we can provide investment incentive.”
If companies don’t produce a value-added product from minerals on the government’s “critical” list, there is no tax credit under a policy modelled on part of the US Inflation Reduction Act. It is aimed at encouraging multibillion-dollar investments in processing of commodities such as lithium, rare earths, graphite, cobalt, vanadium and nickel.
Mrs Rinehart is a big backer of Lynas Rare Earths and Arafura Rare Earths as well as Liontown Resources and other lithium players. Fortescue executive chairman Andrew Forrest, another WA-based billionaire, is a supporter of renewable hydrogen despite the company’s green energy arm shedding hundreds of jobs last year.
On critical minerals, King says no investor is “going to make gazillions of dollars overnight” by going downstream.
“It’s going to take a long time and be a really slow burn because of the magnitude of the challenge,” she says.
Part of the challenge is China’s dominance of critical minerals supply chains and expertise in the field that is lacking in Australia.
King has made working with the US and other Western nations on non-China critical minerals supply chains a priority during her time in the resources portfolio, and acknowledges the risk of upsetting Australia’s biggest trading partner.
“The relationship (with China) is very important to us. My view is we just need to compete.
They invested in the research and development of critical minerals and rare earths,” she says.
“Maybe we should have done that 20 years ago but we haven’t, and we are now. We have to start somewhere. This is about us competing with China. We are not going to disrupt to any great extent their position in the market because it is so massive after so long.”
King and then US secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo led the inaugural meeting of the Australia-US Taskforce on Critical Minerals in November 2023.
King also worked on a pact billed by the government as the “NATO of critical minerals” that could see projects in Australia funded by the US or other allies through a joint financing body.
In her home state, King expects Labor to hold on to all four seats it won from the Liberal Party at the previous federal election in 2022. She doesn’t see it as an imperative that WA has another voice in cabinet if that success is repeated.
“I’d welcome one of my WA colleagues ... but equally the whole cabinet knows the importance of WA,” she says.
Labor Premier Roger Cook has said his government was “proudly independent” and his focus was on ensuring re-election on March 8 rather than helping to shore up local seats crucial to the party’s federal hopes.
Asked whether WA’s pro-resources policies will help with Labor’s chances at a federal level, King says: “I don’t know of a WA government that hasn’t been a good friend for mining … It is the basis for our economy and has been for a very long time now.”
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