It is possible to argue that Albo the Disaster doomed his first term in its first week.
I contacted the new government directly that week and told them to get off their arse and apply export levies to the gas cartel, or they would pay.
They did nothing but make excuses for the cartel and allowed $1Gj Aussie gas to rise to $70Gj. Taking electricity prices with it.
The decision to do nothing about the Ukraine War energy price shock is still pouring inflation into the Aussie economy today:
Including gas, this is more than 2% of the last year’s CPI. Arguably, it is double with spillovers. This is the core of the entire inflation crisis.
As you can see, much of it is now priced, and there will be some bill relief when the AEMO reverses a portion of the price increases next July.
However, today, we are presented with a terrific measure of how badly the Albanese Government handled the energy shock.
Europe was the centre of the problem as the Ukraine War commenced and gas flows from Russia were squeezed.
Because Europe has bugger all gas reserves, it was forced to pay through the nose to import it from the US instead. This delivered a huge inflation spike through 2022.
Even so, overnight, we saw European inflation far below Australian. Goldman:
In the flash inflation release for November, core HICP inflation fell 61bp to 3.57% yoy, well below expectations. Euro area headline HICP inflation fell 49bp to 2.41%yoy, also sharply below expectations. We estimate that seasonally adjusted sequential core inflation was 0.01%mom, well below the October pace. Within core inflation, we estimate that seasonally adjusted sequential core goods inflation was -0.02%mom (vs 0.08%mom in October), while sequential services inflation was 0.03%mom (vs 0.25%mom in October). We mechanically update our Euro area inflation forecast, and now expect core inflation to be 2.2% in December 2024.
Europe did what it had to secure affordable gas, even though it had none, while Albo sat on his arse protecting energy cartels that had stolen virtually free Aussie gas all year.
The Albanese Government’s core values of corporate grovelling and extremist open borders doomed it within a week of taking power.
