Perverse stuff from The Guardian as it recounts Alan Jones talking with Josh Frydenberg yesterday:
“We’ve also seen states lock up decades worth of resources when it comes to gas,” the energy minister noted.
Jones suddenly sensed he might have washed up in an episode of let’s turn the tables. “Oh, that’s rubbish,” he exploded.
“Well, it’s not rubbish,” Frydenberg said. “Let me ask you this, Alan. Why in New South Wales, where more than 80% of the power comes from coal, have prices continued to go up? And the reason is because you import more than 95% of your gas. Gas sets the price of electricity.
“So if we are going to be honest with the pastry chef who you like to quote who gets up at two in the morning … well, let’s be honest with him and say we can lower those power bills if you develop more gas here in NSW.”
Just to be clear, if you can’t quite decode Frydenberg’s trolling, Jones campaigns relentlessly against unconventional gas development. So in this telling, the one where a certain Sydney shock jock plays a pivotal role in persuading politicians to curtail gas supply, Jones just might have to wear some of the responsibility for high power prices rather than this being a conspiracy perpetrated exclusively by wild-eyed warmists and windfarms, plotting away in paddocks.
One plus one might just equal two.
In the hermetically sealed universe Jones inhabits, one plus one never equals two, so the host wasn’t having a bar of it. He may have even raised his voice. “That is absolute and utter rubbish. I cannot believe … ”
The answer to all this was easy, Jones insisted. It was keeping the gas at home, rather than exporting it. It was just like his childhood on a dairy farm.
Cue bucolic rural idyll, with young Alan at large among the milkers, absorbing life lessons. “If you’ve listened to the program you’ll know what I’ve said about the farm, where I was brought up on the dairy farm.”
“Yes,” Frydenberg noted politely.
“ … and my dad would say how much milk does your mother want,” Jones continued, “so we would keep the milk that was going to service the family and we’d let the rest go to the factory.
“Why don’t we have a gas reservation policy so that the gas that is currently available to us is used for the benefit of Australians and Australian businesses?”
Rather than laughing, which would have been entirely reasonable, Frydenberg continued with his opportunity to tell the Jones listenership that Alan might just have a teensy-weensy something to do with high power prices.
“Well, the fact is the gas we are currently exporting is unconventional gas, which is the gas you’ve been railing against being developed, Alan,” the minister noted.
Why, Frydenberg wondered to no one in particular, would NSW have to keep pulling in gas from Queensland when there was ample supply under the ground?
Alan thought the answer to this conundrum was to change the subject. Why weren’t we building new coal-fired power plants? Frydenberg thought that would be just tremendous in the event anyone wanted to build one. Anyone? Anywhere? *Crickets*
In the meantime, perhaps we could just get more gas out of the ground? Jones sought asylum back in the dairy. “Stop talking rubbish, Josh, we have buckets of it and we are exporting it, why don’t we keep it for our own domestic use?”
In other words it’s not renewables or coal causing electricity price spikes. Price rises have stemmed from curtailed gas supply. More NSW gas should be forthcoming but it still won’t be cheap enough to make a difference. The reserves are expensive and inside the gas cartel.
Domestic reservation is the answer. We need to hold back 10% of cartel exports. Frydenberg knows it will crash electricity prices but won’t do it because he wants to wedge Labor’s renewables agenda with higher energy prices. The excuse of “sovereign risk” is poppycock amid a total gas market failure.
Give us gas reservation now, Frydenberg.
