If such meaningful independence doesn’t exist, it arguably doesn’t make much of a difference who’s name plate is on the ownership?
Unfortunately, Australia really doesn't have much leverage in this space, and forcibly re-nationalizing an asset like that, would cause major diplomatic problems, like the harsh trade sanctions imposed by China over the last few years due to Australia backing a COVID inquiry.
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.
I never imagined that steel production would be particularly labour intensive.
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.