Back in 2022, when Australia was reeling from a historic gas price shock as East Coast energy cartels war-profiteered the invasion of Ukraine, Resources Minister Mad King was dispatched to bring them into line.
Instead, the cartel snowed the minister in a matter of hours as she came away with a deal that guaranteed the historical gouge would intensify.
Pointedly, Mad King didn’t face media scrutiny for selling out the nation because she was whisked away to a fortress of solitude on a remote oil rig by the very war-profiteering gas carteliers she had been sent to discipline.
This staggering failure of policy and probity was never brought to account and perhaps today we can understand why.
For it is the dirty Mad King who leads the parliament in flying free to wherever her mining sponsors want her to appear next:
- Charter flight: Karratha to Wodgina Airport. Provided by: Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA (CME), Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), and the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Assocation (APPEA)
- Charter flight: Wodgina Airport to Christmas Creek, Provided by (as above)
- Charter flight: Christmas Creek to Newman Airport. Provided by (as above)
- Charter flights: Karratha to Perth. Provided by (as above)
- Charter flight: Barrow Island to Karratha Airport. Provided by: as above. Purpose of these five trips: Pilbara Resource Sector Familiarisation and Networking Tour
- Hardy Aviation flight from Darwin to Jabiru Airport and return. Provided by: Energy Resources of Australia for site visit of the Ranger Mine
- Qatar Airways complimentary upgrade to first class on QR900 Doha to Perth
If that’s not bad enough, spare a thought for Australians still using gas following Mad King’s catastrophic failure.
The gas cartel also sponsors the Grattan Institute, which helped so greatly in its formation when it recommended in 2013 that the cartel be allowed to run amok instead of being corralled by domestic reservation policies.
Grattan followed that shocker up a few years later with the recommendation that Australians be pulled off gas, even though they hardly use it, and the cartel uses far more, as well as polluting with gay abandon via fugitive emissions:
What was the point of electrifying households in the first place if the gas cartel also sets the price of electricity?
The price of both is still at nosebleed levels. Gas is 400% above historical averages:
And electricity is triple:
Now, more cartel chickens are coming home to roost for households:
Households using gas are set to be hit with extra charges worth up to $138 over three years, with an energy giant blaming hikes on government energy policies.
And more pain lies ahead, with pipeline operators signalling the need to speed up their cost recovery systems – paid over time through bills – because of declining customer numbers.
Distribution giant AusNet, which has 680,000 customers across Victoria, is the first to apply to the Australian Energy Regulator to hike network access fees, arguing that costs the regulator had approved last year were already outdated due to government policy changes.
Its submission to the AER says the Victorian government’s electrification push, which includes a ban on new home gas connections, means its network “must inevitably cease growing and start declining in size”.
I humbly suggest that the only way to lift living standards for Australian householders is to get a job as a gas cartel shill like their betters.
No economy or nation can survive this level of corruption in energy policy.
