A new letter to Do-nothing Malcolm today from the AWU:
Dear Prime Minister,
We are facing an energy crisis and we need you to act rationally and decisively in the national interest now.
Australia is set to become the world’s largest exporter of gas. While this is a profitable situation for foreign multinational gas companies, allowing unrestricted gas exports has upended Australia’s energy market.
Australia is now the only gas exporting country in the world that allows multinational gas exporters unrestricted access to domestic gas reserves for export. This is driving up energy prices, eroding national competitiveness, closing businesses, destroying jobs, and hurting communities.
Australia finds itself in a bizarre situation where despite producing a record amount of gas we are paying the world’s highest prices at home. In fact, Australians are paying more for our own gas than the prices we charge China, Japan and Korea.
That some gas multinationals are now looking to import gas from overseas to take advantage of high Australian prices, should be called for what it is – high farce.
As a result of government negligence, with every shipment of gas we are now exporting jobs competitiveness and importing the world’s highest prices. This may work for foreign gas companies, but it doesn’t work for Australia’s economy.
Cheap gas has traditionally fuelled Australia’s energy competitiveness and powered downstream manufacturing for decades. Going forward it should be providing abundant and cost-effective carbon reductions as Australia moves to a cleaner energy future.
Instead, during recent energy shortages a South Australian gas plant sat dormant, having ceased operating due to the high cost of natural gas. The fact that gas plants are closing down in a country gifted with an over-abundance of natural gas demonstrates the crisis that we are in.
Australian manufacturing relies on affordable gas as a key national advantage.
Without affordable gas, BIS Shrapnel estimates that one in five heavy manufacturers will close down, and 235,000 jobs will be lost by 2021.
In the words of BlueScope CEO Paul O’Malley, ‘if there is gas in Australia and we say it can go overseas, and we don’t have any baseload generation, I think we are going to have an energy catastrophe in Australia.’
This energy crisis amounts to a national emergency and we need to act.
All true. Here’s the gas chart:
And the electricity chart (the green arrow is the carbon price repeal, red arrows are the Curtis Island LNG train startups):
Gas reservation is a given at this point. But we also need “use it or lose it” gas laws to force Shell into either developing or selling the Arrow gas reserves, the largest hoard on the east coast:
I recommend a publicly owned gas provider develop it and benchmark prices at mandated rates of return forcing the cartel to heal.
