At the time, such forests were considered a managed natural resource, and ripe for exploitation. Immediately before and during the Great Depression, Australia—then largely an exporter of agricultural and mineral commodities—suffered as commodity prices fell. Unemployment peaked at 27% in 1932. During World War II, under wartime industry controls, unemployment in Australia reached a new low of 1.1%. During the war, new manufacturing facilities were established and employment in the sector accounted for much of the reduction in unemployment; government saw growth in manufacturing as providing reliable employment, which would reduce the chance of another depression. Manufacturing in Australia was protected from import competition by a regime of tariffs. At the end of WWII, the Commonwealth government and all state governments, except South Australia, were held by Australian Labor Party. The ALP has a key part of its platform known as the "socialist objective". In more recent times, the socialist objective has largely been ignored but, in the 1940s, the ALP's policy was to centralise control of the economy, including plans to nationalise the banks. A significant number of large enterprises in the Australian economy were already state-owned enterprises, and the government thinking of the time was that was a desirable outcome. Western Australia lies far from the more-industrialised, eastern parts of Australia. During and immediately after WWII, it had a Labor government. The WA government view was that its involvement would be needed to facilitate industrial development of the state. They also saw an iron and steel industry using local iron ore as being key to further industrialisation of the sparsely populated state. Albert Hawke was the Minister of Industrial Development. He was also the member for the electorate of Northam, which contained the future location of Wundowrie. Although the government had been investigating local production of iron using charcoal for some years, the story of the plant at Wundowrie begins with the passing of the "Wood Distillation and Charcoal Iron and Steel Industry Act 1943". This authorised the state government to set up and operate a plant to carry out "wood distillation and the production of Charcoal Iron and of Steel" and to set up a "Charcoal Iron and Steel Industry Board of Management". The champion of this legislation was Albert Hawke. The plant was to produce 10,000 tons of pig iron, 480 tons of acetic acid, and 112,000 gallons of wood naphtha each year. The chemicals were to be a by-product of the production—via destructive distillation of wood, in externally-heated closed retorts—of charcoal to be used in a blast furnace for making iron.