Including Albo himself, it apparently takes five ministers to change a light bulb:
The federal government is debating whether to slap unprecedented price controls on gas companies through existing gas trigger laws as it urgently seeks a way to ease the burden of soaring energy bills confronting households and businesses.
As soaring international energy prices deliver record revenue for some Australian oil and gas companies, Federal Industry Minister Ed Husic escalated his attack on the industry on Thursday, accusing them of creating a “glut of greed problem” and claiming they are failing to hear Australians’ concerns.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government was working “around the clock” to come up with a solution to prevent energy prices from soaring, and intended to have a solution before the New Year.
Husic’s outburst prompted a scathing response from the oil and gas industry leaders, who accused him of “demonising and misrepresenting” their sector and its crucial contribution to the economy.
Why is it so difficult for Albo’s cowards to do something so obvious and simple as to apply a capped price or export levies to Aussie gas (and coal)? In part, because the media is swamped by propaganda from the Evil Gas Cartel making the politics much harder than the policy.
As we know, the Evil Gas Cartel lied to create its monopoly in the first place:
As Santos worked toward approving its company-transforming Gladstone LNG project at the start of this decade, managing director David Knox made the sensible statement that he would approve one LNG train, capable of exporting the equivalent of half the east coast’s gas demand, rather than two because the venture did not yet have enough gas for the second.
“You’ve got to be absolutely confident when you sanction trains that you’ve got the full gas supply to meet your contractual obligations that you’ve signed out with the buyers,” Mr Knox told investors in August 2010 when asked why the plan was to sanction just one train first up.
“In order to do it (approve the second train) we need to have absolute confidence ourselves that we’ve got all the molecules in order to fill that second train.”
But in the months ahead, things changed. In January, 2011, the Peter Coates-chaired Santos board approved a $US16 billion plan to go ahead with two LNG trains from the beginning….as a result of the decision and a series of other factors, GLNG last quarter had to buy more than half the gas it exported from other parties.
…In hindsight, assumptions that gave Santos confidence it could find the gas to support two LNG trains, and which were gradually revealed to investors as the project progressed, look more like leaps of faith.
…When GLNG was approved as a two-train project, Mr Knox assuredly answered questions about gas reserves.
“We have plenty of gas,” he told investors. “We have the reserves we require, which is why we’ve not been participating in acquisitions in Queensland of late — we have the reserves, we’re very confident of that.”
But even then, and unbeknown to investors, Santos was planning more domestic gas purchases, from a domestic market where it had wrongly expected prices to stay low.
There have been many, many untruths since. And today that great tradition continues:
Samantha McCulloch, chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) slammed Husic’s “name-calling and sledging” of Australian gas companies, which she said support 80,000 workers and enable almost $500 billion of economic activity.
“It is easy to misrepresent how the gas market works, but the facts are that average domestic prices are well below international prices,” she said.
But, are these prices reasonable given the gas comes come out of the ground at $5Gj and the giant markup is only the result of a gas monopoly and a very distant foreign war?
The 80k gas workers are also being gouged at home and at the supermarket by the resulting utility bill spikes and they represent only 0.5% of the workforce anyway. The $500bn figure is not the gas sector’s direct contribution to GDP. That is only $50bn, or 2.5% of the economy (if we include oil):
If gas is an input into $500bn of activity then that only tells you that 2.5% of GDP is holding one-quarter of it to ransom. In fact, given energy touches everything, it is fairer to say that 2.5% of the economy is gouging the other 97.5%.
It’s time the media banned the Evil Gas Cartel from publication. It is grotesquely self-serving, full of propaganda, and fails any test of public interest dialectic you care to name.
