A senior Australian government minister travelled more than 10,000 miles to view the achievements of a steel business in South Wales, whose parent company has just burst onto the industrial scene Down Under.

Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia minister for finance, resources and energy, went on a fact-finding tour of Liberty Steel Newport, part of the Liberty House Group which, along with its sister energy company Simec, has just bought Australia’s largest integrated mining and steel business.

Under the umbrella of the GFG Alliance, Liberty and Simec have been delivering their strategy to revive heavy industry in the UK and other parts of the world by combining steelmaking with clean energy generation, and integrating this with high-value engineering. This is known as the Greensteel strategy.

During the visit, the minister heard how Liberty had reopened the Newport hot strip mill at the height of the UK steel crisis in 2015 and now runs the plant on renewable bio-liquid which drives its on-site generators. The company intends to invest heavily to restore liquid steel production to the site for the first time in many years by installing an electric arc furnace to melt UK scrap; creating hundreds of new jobs.

Mr Koutsantonis was also briefed on plans to turn the neighbouring Simec power station site in Uskmouth into a centre of excellence for a wide range of renewable energy technologies including biomass, waste-to-energy and potentially tidal lagoon power to drive its metals and engineering businesses across the country.

He said he was keen to discover more about the progress being made by Liberty in transforming UK metals and engineer businesses into profitable concerns and plugging them into a low carbon future.

Following two years of rapid growth through high-profile acquisitions, Liberty and Simec now employ a total of more than 5,500 industrial workers across the UK.

The businesses, owned by international entrepreneur Sanjeev Gupta, recently doubled their global workforce to more than 11,000 through their acquisition in Australia, which included the iconic Whyalla integrated steelworks in South Australia.

To make Whyalla sustainable, GFG intends to work with state and federal government in Australia to introduce largescale green energy to the plant including hydro, solar and heat recapture from existing processes.

Mr Koutsantonis said: “It’s very encouraging to see what GFG is achieving here in Wales and the UK as a whole. The group clearly has an imaginative and ambitious programme to revive and sustain industry and that approach is securing highly-skilled British jobs for the long term. We’re looking to seeing the same thing happen in Australia.”

He was joined at the site by Newport East MP Jessica Morden.