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The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, says there is optimism that steel making will continue in his state, after the closure of a major blast furnace at Whyalla was announced yesterday.

Speaking to ABC News Breakfast from Whyalla and donned in some hi-vis, Malinauskas says there was disappointment, heartbreak, but also a sense of inevitability when the announcement was made.

[Whyalla] has the capacity to be a viable operation but it hasn’t been recapitalised. The blast furnace is over 60 years old. It was first built in 1965 and blast furnaces of this age not to be realigned on a frequent basis. This hasn’t been done in 20 years. The fact it’s still going is a miracle.

We need to have the plant recapitalised and that’s exactly the plan we have in conjunction with the federal government … if we lose this capacity behind me, this country doesn’t have structural steel-making capacity and we can’t afford that.

If Pauline Hanson wants to take us down the road of Americanising our politics, so people in a family who disagree on political issues can’t speak to each other any longer, this is the pathway to do it …

We’ve got lots of challenges facing Australia, but we’re not going to solve them by punching down on things that are brilliant about our country. So I think it’s rotten. I think it’s awful. I think it’s ugly.

I just don’t agree with those comments. But I actually do agree with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price when she says that there are serious issues that do need to be discussed. And these comments shouldn’t be a distraction from them. I mean, why aren’t we closing the gap?