Labor’s approach to energy and climate is generally more rational than the Coalition’s mix of culture war agendas and big-stick interventions. But the Albanese government’s plan, driven by a mix of populist politics and green ideology, for a mandatory code of conduct to force gas to be sold to domestic users at a “reasonable price” is Labor reverting to its worst anti-business, pro-regulation, big-government instincts.
Modern Labor has no sense of Australia’s wealth emanating from its great extractive industries.
The gas industry says it has been blindsided and received no warning that this was on the cards. It rightly warns of sovereign and political risk jeopardising investment in the new gas supply that is needed to sustainably bring down prices and help keep the lights on during the net zero transition.
This has spurred the populist attack launched by Industry Minister Ed Husic, who likens the gas companies’ questioning of Labor’s market-distorting energy plan to Facebook’s pulling of Australian news content from its platform in protest against Australia’s world first media bargaining code.
Demonising gas producers
This is baselessly demonising the gas producers, many of them Australian-owned, that have invested tens of billions of dollars of risk capital – often for low or no returns during periods of low global prices – while developing Australia into an LNG exporting global powerhouse.
It is reminiscent of Kevin Rudd cherry-picking the mining tax from the Henry tax review to confiscate resource “rents” to pay for Labor’s spending promises without implementing any genuine incentive-sharpening tax reform.
It shows that modern Labor has no sense of Australia’s wealth emanating from its great extractive industries, and hence the need to maintain the confidence of international investors in the resources sector that is now propping up the tax base and the value of the Australian dollar, which increases the nation’s purchasing power.
The verbal battering of the gas companies, the overtones of 1970s-style Rex Connor-style resource nationalism, and the “Gregory thesis” kind of hostility towards mining, means business now surely has the measure of the business-unfriendly way the Albanese government does politics.
