In Australia, all the way down at the bottom of the world, it sometimes takes time for certain messages to reach us from overseas.

Under the federal Albanese government, Australia is still steadfastly committed to the policy of Net Zero emissions. Higher costs are imposed on Australians to reduce emissions. Subsidies are doled out to wealthy households in the form of electric vehicle subsidies. And foreign companies are offered guaranteed revenues to invest in solar and wind projects, paid for by the Australian people who are not allowed to know how much this will cost.

Meanwhile across Europe, North America, and Asia, climate policies are being walked back as the extraordinary costs Net Zero imposes on families and businesses are biting hard.

The Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is part of a group of European leaders who are trying to belatedly limit the damage. European manufacturing and industrial businesses have been hammered by the Net Zero policy, which includes a Europe-wide emissions trading scheme (ETS), similar to Australia’s Safeguard Mechanism (SGM).

Statistics collected by the online publication The Brawl Street Journal are revealing: investment in Europe’s chemicals sector – an upstream component of modern manufacturing – plunged 86.6 per cent in 2025, and manufacturing production across Germany, Italy, and Hungary has plummeted in recent years. Since the end of 2017, industrial production in Germany is down by some 20 per cent.

The European ETS is due for a review, and Babiš, along with leaders from Germany, Italy, and Belgium, have been calling for the scheme to be delayed or watered down to try and save what is left of industry and manufacturing jobs.

Babiš has said that the European Union must cap its ETS carbon price at €30 (around $50) per tonne as this ‘is the only thing to save the industry immediately’. The current EU carbon price is over €70 (around $117) per tonne, a price which has decreased in recent days as leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have directly criticised the EU’s policies.

For context, the Institute of Public Affairs analysis has highlighted that carbon prices of around $300 per tonne are required under the Albanese government’s current climate policies. Such high costs are simply unbearable for industry, as the European experience has demonstrated.

Australians have constantly been told of the opportunities for lower electricity prices and the manufacturing opportunities that will flow from Net Zero climate policies. But this is the opposite of the truth. Since Australia signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, our electricity prices have steadily risen, manufacturing businesses have shut down, oil refineries have closed, and the jobs we were told were coming have failed to materialise.

A wave of smelters and refineries have closed or announced their plans to close since the Albanese government was first elected, including most recently the Kemerton lithium refinery in Western Australia. Politicians can say that they want a Future Made in Australia as much as they want, but the reality is that their climate policies are delivering a future where nothing is made in Australia.

There is a direct link between imposing new and more drastic climate policies and losing industrial capacity and manufacturing jobs. Consider the fact that that before Australia signed up to international climate agreements beginning with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, we had eight oil refineries and produced 93 per cent of the refined fuel that we needed domestically. Today, we have just two, and import around 80 per cent of our refined fuels.

In more news from Europe, the French government last week released its Multiannual Energy Plan No. 3, which outlined cuts to planned investments in solar and onshore wind. It also reversed a decision to shut down 14 nuclear reactors, instead planning to keep them running and build six new ones, taking their total fleet to 63.

Australia was a few years behind Europe in going down the path of Net Zero, but we shouldn’t be so slow in following their lead and walking back unpopular and economically suicidal climate policies.

Cian Hussey is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and writes No Permanent Solutions on Substack.