Australia’s failed energy markets are now a full-blown national security crisis. Not a national interest crisis. A national security crisis.
A war-profiteering energy cartel is pillaging the Australian economy, Most especially manufacturing, but absolutely everybody else as well.
I am talking about scores of billions of dollars ripped from everybody’s pocket as if some greed singularity had opened everywhere all at once.
It is doing so without an Australian Government to fight it, and in the face of an Idiot Mainstream Media (IMSM) preoccupied with quaint notions of more women in parliament:
Energy retailer ReAmped Energy has urged its 70,000 customers on Australia’s east coast to find another supplier or face a doubling of their power bills from July 1.
With energy retailers on the brink following a massive increase in wholesale prices this year, there are growing concerns some retailers might go under, like in the United Kingdom.
Australian Energy Retailer chairwoman Clare Savage has already warned wholesale power prices would stay high in NSW and Queensland for at least the next two years.
This is the tiniest tip of an iceberg that is right now ripping a screaming hole in the side of the SS Aussie Titanic as wholesale gas and electricity prices rise 500-1000%.
Australian manufacturers are being wiped from the face of the earth by gas prices that are unfathomably high when the gas itself comes out of the ground up the road for $1Gj but is being sold at a regulator enforced fixed price of $40Gj.
In power markets, the duck curve is dead. Night and day, east coast electricity prices are locked on $300M/h, up 600% in a matter of months. It may get worse.
ALL Australian businesses and households on the electricity grid east of WA are beginning to see riotous utility bill hikes for as far as the eye can see. Both are going to retrench viciously.
Utilities make up 3% of the CPI, which is about to double and double again, as it pours inflation into the other 97%. Including building materials where cost inflation is already annihilating the sector.
The RBA is being cornered into massive rate hikes. Household balance sheets and the financial system are, therefore, at fatal risk given house prices are already falling fast.
Australian bond yields are seeing widening inflation spreads to the US which will drive up the AUD even as the economy buckles.
All this, while the gas half of the energy war-profiteers sells its product to China – Australia’s strategic rival and greatest threat – 25% cheaper!
It is no exaggeration to say that this energy shock, delivered by a few mining companies, is an imminent threat to the viability of the sovereign, as sure as if Australia were bordered by Russia and it was refusing to supply us with energy as an act if war.
This is so beyond the pale, so reckless, and so outside of any identifiable social contract by the war profiteers, that it opens a stunning opportunity for the Albanese Government to restructure the entire energy sector.
I have argued that an export levy on commodity sales to end war profiteering and crash local prices is probably beyond the Albanese Government’s political courage.
But these few companies have now destroyed east coast gas markets. The regulator is imposing ridiculously high fixed prices, with electricity in danger of following.
This is an act of economic war, not just war profiteering. Thus it opens the way for the Albanese Government to go ALL-OUT in response.
Newly appointed Resources Minister Madeleine King and Energy and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen must immediately impose a 100% war profiteering export levy on every LNG and coal export above pre-Ukraine prices. Stick the scores of billions in a sovereign wealth fund, pay down debt, or cure cancer with it.
Or not.
Sadly for Australia, the Albanese Government appears to have no idea of the magnitude of the crisis and no balls to boot:
“We’ve got a real issue with power prices and that’s the legacy of having had a decade under the Liberals.”
The cost of living crisis is a big problem for the Prime Minister and his new Labor government, as power prices soar. #9Today pic.twitter.com/VCNyDJrRiu
— The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) May 31, 2022
As his first act as PM, Albo should be seizing the energy robber barons’ ill-gotten gains and ripping the economy back from their claws in the name of every other Australian.
Instead, he is committing suicide in week one.
