This is so egregious that I don’t know where to look:
Energy Minister Angus Taylor will warn the energy crisis facing Europe could happen in Australia unless new gas fields are opened up as he unveils budget funding to accelerate the development of seven projects.
As the government moves to make energy security a feature of the coming election campaign, Mr Taylor will claim Labor cannot be trusted to support the expansion of the gas sector to prevent the escalation of electricity prices.
He will tell the Australian Domestic Gas Outlook Conference that a failure to bring on new supply could see gas prices escalate like in Europe, where there has been a 300 per cent increase in the past year.
“Bills have skyrocketed, energy retailers have closed, factories have been mothballed, and families have been forced to choose between eating or heating,” Mr Taylor will tell the conference.
“With Russian gas accounting for around 32 per cent of total European and UK gas consumption in 2021, the full impact of the current crisis remains to be seen.
“The energy crisis in Europe should act as a warning of what could happen in Australia if there is not enough investment in the gas sector here.”
Well, there you have it. Australia is as energy-poor as Europe.
Except we’re not energy poor. We’re energy stinking rich. Especially in gas.
Nor are we dependent upon an enemy for energy supplies. Indeed, we are supplying our communist adversary and leaving ourselves short in the process.
How does the “Psycho” Morrison government come up with these outrageous, national security trashing, lies?
Because a decade of Coalition Governments have joined hands with a blood-sucking gas cartel to export so much of it that the domestic economy has been starved and endured a self-imposed energy shock.
This has nothing to do with Russia or Europe or Labor. The Great Australian Gas Cartel has engulfed the Coalition such that:
- Australians have very often been paying more for their own gas than have Asian customers.
- This has hollowed out Australian manufacturing including much of the same chemical manufacturing capacity that Morrison is now talking about restoring with subsidies.
- Most of the gas goes to China, which builds weapons with it, just as the Coalition bleats about the China national security risk.
- It has never successfully implemented a sustained domestic gas reservation regime to hold down prices which it could do with the stroke of a pen.
- It bald-faced lied to Centre Alliance when it did a deal for $28bn in tax cuts in exchange for a domestic gas reservation mechanism.
- All of this drove an immense energy shock to east coast businesses and consumers over the past decade while WA looked on with no such troubles because it has a domestic reservation regime.
- It has held back renewable investment at every stage and level to protect coal and gas which has kept utility prices far higher than they needed to be.
- As such, the “gas-led recovery” is nothing more than public subsidies to tear up the Australian countryside for gas to send to China to end our freedoms.
New supply is useless without blanket domestic reservation. The cartel will simply ship even more volumes to China from unreserved areas and sell the most expensive leftover gas here.
The only solution is to reserve the lowest cost gas for domestic use. At a fixed price if necessary. We need only keep 10% of export volumes. The rest of it can go to Asia. The irony is, doing so would lift the export price so that there is no cost to doing so!
We should obviously take that 10% directly from China, which threatens us daily and use it to ensure our industrial base is intact in the event of a conflict.
Or, you can take the brown paper bag:
Everyone wondered whether there was some connection between the government’s direction and its financial indebtedness to the fossil fuel industry. But no one could prove it. Why? Because the Commonwealth doesn’t have real time disclosure of political donations.
Only now, long after the public’s attention has moved on, have those suspicions been confirmed. Thanks to the donations data recently made public on the Australian Electoral Commission site, we know that fossil fuel companies — and the gas industry in particular — were giving generously to both major parties at the time, a whopping $1,329,754 to be precise, with just over half of this from the gas industry.
The Coalition got the lion’s share ($731,534), although Labor collected the not-insignificant sum of $598,220.
If you add to the Coalition’s total for that year the just over $1 million the LNP harvested from fossil fuel via its fundraising entity Cormack, the Coalition’s indebtedness to gas, coal and mining in the 2020-21 period swells to $1,735,048.
Is this proof of corruption? No, but it certainly gives reason for voters to consider whether corruption has taken place. To wit, whether the gas-led recovery policy was designed and intended by the Morrison government to serve the public interest or private ones.
In the context of the government’s own Arc of Autcoracy, this is beyond corruption. It is treason.
