Good question and it’s an interesting rabbit hole to dive into. Chinese steel exports to Australia are a rounding error. Australia has a relatively small population.

https://legacy.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/exports-china....

Australia doesn’t have much in the way of domestic manufacturing need for steel, so there’s little internal base demand to support production. Australian labour costs more, so as a steel producer it would have trouble competing with China on export markets.

The US and Japan do have domestic steel production, but they both have steel hungry manufacturing sectors, and anyway they specialise in high quality specialist steel products. Those take expensive specialist facilities and highly skilled workers, but there’s no real way for Australia to develop such specialist facilities and skills from scratch.

> Australian labour costs more, so as a steel producer it would have trouble competing with China on export markets.

I never imagined that steel production would be particularly labour intensive.

I can't tell for scale, but I rememer BHP billiton spinning out bluescope steel as a company which at that time was creating something like 5 milion tonnes of steel a year. I have a feeling that there is capability, but I'm not sure that its the right capability (as this is not my area).

I'm just confused how it would be cheaper to ship the unprocessed ore across the ocean at a cheaper cost than processing it locally and shipping the finished product.