When Professor Ross Garnaut recently declared at the Jobs Destruction Summit that Australia must tax the energy cartels to death, Treasurer Chicken Chalmers demured:
A Labor source said Dr Chalmers was still “scarred” from the failed “super profits” mining tax in 2010 when he was a senior adviser to then treasurer Wayne Swan, and that he did not want to revisit the idea.
Wake up Chicken Chalmers:
The European Union is zeroing in on a plan to cap energy companies’ profits and channel the cash to consumers, as it steps closer to energy rationing in a bid to tame the crisis.
The Commission wants to cap revenues from lower-cost power generators; introduce a levy on fossil fuel companies’ excess profits; and introduce a mandatory consumption cut.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plans still need to be finalized and ultimately signed off by member states and there are deep divisions as to how to address the crisis. Already the most controversial idea — to cap the price of imported Russian gas — has been shelved for more talks.
That all sounds good to me:
- Europe is going to break the linkage between marginal pricing power and broader generation. This will cap rents accumulating around cheap energy providers like renewables and nuclear. The revenue cap of 180EUR MW/h is still immensely profitable so should not retard investment.
- It is also going to break the link between the evil gas cartel and energy end-users by rehypothecating the war profits to energy end users. This is clumsy and inefficient but as an energy importer Europe does not have the luxury of suppressing prices further up the supply chain.
But Australia does.
Albo’s cowards must follow Europe’s lead and apply a $7Gj trigger to the ADGSM or, even better, apply an export levy to gas and coal benchmarked to pre-Ukraine war prices.
Chicken Chalmers has a PhD in Keating reforms. Here’s his chance to be his idle. He will prevent a 5-6% blowout in the CPI, prevent demolition of household real income, and prevent trillions from being wiped from household wealth.
Goddamn, coward.
