In this detailed interview with John Stanley from Radio 2GB, I discuss several critical areas of policy failure that are damaging the Australian economy and trashing living standards.
Of particular note, I deride Resources Minister Madeleine King, who last week rejected the notion of reserving East Coast gas for domestic use on the grounds that it would turn the “lights off in countries that depend on Australian gas for their energy security”, including China.
Basically, King is more concerned about the welfare of Chinese residents than Australians.
Her comments are especially laughable, given that she has previously praised Western Australia’s gas reservation policy.
Below are highlights from the interview.
Albo’s Future Made in Australia policy is worthless without cheap energy:
Australians may or may not be aware that we have the lowest manufacturing share in the OECD. We have the smallest manufacturing sector in the developed world as a share of our economy.
In order to boost Australia’s manufacturing capacity, the Albanese government announced it’s 23 billion dollar Future Made in Australia subsidies for low-emission manufacturing…
This week, the Productivity Commission released its annual Trade and Assistance Review which warned that the Albanese government’s Future Made policy risked creating a host of inefficient and uncompetitive firms that will forever be relying on subsidies and also risked degrading Australia’s future productivity growth and living standards.
Australia will never be competitive in building those things and the Productivity Commission asked why we’re throwing billions of dollars of taxpayer money at firms to build stuff that we should never really be involved in.
The fact of the matter is that we can’t have a competitive manufacturing industry without cheap and affordable energy.
But thanks to a broken East Coast gas market, Australia’s gas and electricity prices are among the most expensive in the world.
If the Albanese government truly wanted Australian manufacturing to be competitive and for Australia’s manufacturing share to increase, rather than throwing taxpayer money at lost causes, it would fix Australia’s East Coast gas market and deliver us cheap gas and electricity.
All it needs to do is simply follow Western Australia’s lead as well as that of every other gas exporting nation and reserve gas for domestic use…
We cannot have an efficient manufacturing sector unless we have cheap energy. And we’ve seen a whole host of manufacturers this year either close down or say that they’re going to close down because we’ve got high energy costs…
They are uncompetitive because they are being required to pay four times the gas price of what they’d pay in America…
If we fixed the gas market and delivered cheap electricity and cheap gas, our domestic manufacturing would be in a much better place to compete than it will be if we don’t do those things.
The government’s solution, instead of fixing the underlying cause and making our industry more competitive by lowering energy costs to below the world average, is to throw money at loss causes. It is not solving the underlying problem.
We’ve seen this all over the place. For example, the government is handing out rental subsidies while it runs record immigration, which is pushing up rents, instead of not running the record immigration in the first place.
But Mad King refuses to fix the broken gas market:
71% of our East Coast gas is being exported to Asia, principally China and Japan. And those nations are receiving more of our gas than they need and are re-exporting it for profit.
At the same time, we are suffering an artificial shortage of gas at home and obscenely high gas prices that are three to six times what Americans pay, who are actually the biggest gas exporters in the world…
The greens came out this week and supported domestic reservation of gas. But Resources Minister Madeline King said “oh no, you can’t do that”. It will raise sovereign risk.
She also said that domestic reservation would “turn the lights off in countries dependent on gas for their energy needs”.
Well, what about our energy needs? I’m an Australian and I think our Australian government should care more about Australians than people in China or Japan…
Why can’t we have an Australia first policy like every other gas exporter has? Even West Australia has a WA First policy with respect to gas.
The hilarious thing is that Madeline King has, on multiple occasions, praised Western Australia’s gas reservation policy. So if she praises Western Australia’s policy but opposes reservation on the East Coast because she is more concerned about the welfare of Chinese residents than Australian residents.
She says we can’t do reservation because it would “turn the lights off” in Asia while we turn the lights off in our own country…
Australia has a controlled experiment whereby the West Coast has done one thing with gas reservation and the East Coast has done another. And just look at the results?
Look at what Western Australia has gotten and then look at what the East Coast has gotten. Also, look at what the US and all these other places with gas reservation have gotten.
You can just see that East Coast Australia is the outlier. We have completely stuffed up policy and we need the federal government to change track urgently.
