A surge of popular discontent has arrived in Canberra with a caravan of a million men clamoring for energy price relief. Riot police greeted the protestors briefly but joined the melee in short order when presented with their own prospective utility bill price hikes
Resources Minister Mad King was surrounded by the enraged mob, pelted with rotten fruit, feces, and gravel. As the seething mass bayed for blood, a makeshift gibbet was raised in the courtyard of Parliament House.
Bloodshed was only averted with the arrival and intervention of gas lobby private security guards in a riot tank, which sprayed the crowd from a cannon loaded with carcinogenic salts.
The boiling crowd fell back, regrouped, surged forward, and rolled the tank before setting it ablaze.
New APPEA head Samantha McCulloch was last seen scrambling from the burning hulk still yelling maniacally “gas pays too much tax”.
If only this were reporting instead of fantasy. We’ll have to settle for manufacturers and consumer lobbies bleating at Albo’s gas whale:
The resource minister, Madeleine King, on Thursday said the government had signed a new agreement with the big gas exporters from eastern Australia that would ensure there was sufficient supplies to meet local demand.
But industry and consumer groups said prices being offered were as high as $70/GJ. At that price, everything from groceries to electricity bills will continue to climb, they said.
“Getting sufficient volumes of Australian sourced gas to supply the Australian market should never be a question we need to answer,” the chief executive of the Energy Users’ Association of Australia (EUAA), Andrew Richards, said. “[It] seems we will have plenty of gas, it’s just a pity that nobody will be able to afford it.”
…The executive director of Manufacturing Australia, Ben Eade, said the agreement “smashes investment confidence for gas customers while entrenching super profits”.
“It condemns more Australians to paying global spot gas prices that are already at unsustainable highs,” he said. “At the same time, it makes the job of transitioning to a lower emissions energy sector much harder because it will make it much more expensive.”
…“Gas producers have got to recognise that they have a role to play in meeting the national interest and not working against it,” the industry minister, Ed Husic, told ABC’s RN Breakfast on Friday.
“There is definitely room there to supply at prices for an Australian resource that meets the needs of Australian manufacturers and households,” he said.
…The manager of policy and research at St Vincent de Paul Society, Gavin Dufty, said the gas pact gave some certainty to the market but potentially locked in high gas and electricity prices for a long time.
The principal national adviser for the AiGroup, Tennant Reed, said support for the most vulnerable 10% of households and businesses to nullify the impact of higher energy costs could reach $6bn to $7bn over three years.
…Future wholesale power prices were higher across the National Electricity Market, Reed said. New South Wales’s 2023 power price had risen to $235/MWh as of Thursday, up from $216/MWh last Friday. While those in Queensland were at almost $227/MWh up from $209/MWh.
Reed said the higher gas prices fed directly into power prices. An open cycle gas generator paying $8/GJ for gas could generate electricity at about $100/MWh, but at $50/GJ the cost was up $600/MWh.
Crushed under the gas whale, Industry Minister Ed Husic wheezed:
Industry Minister Ed Husic said, the government would now focus on measures to lower prices.
He said gas producers “have got to recognise that they have a role to play in meeting the national interest and not working against it”.
“The focus on price is going to be critical not just for ensuring that households can have access to gas at prices that they’re accustomed to,” Mr Husic told the ABC.
“We’ve been elected with a clear focus on revitalising manufacturing, and there is a national interest in doing that, not just in terms of the jobs it creates and the way it helps firms.”
Also squashed, deputy PM Richard Marles choked out a series of lies:
This is only the beginning. Price shocks will keep coming like clockwork. The next step will be energy bill subsidies.
Which is why Chicken Chalmers has also been swallowed by the gas whale:
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the global economic environment remains dangerous and difficult before this month’s federal budget, as he takes caution from the roiling of financial markets sparked by British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s economic plan.
…“The global environment is a dangerous and difficult place right now. Even in the last month or so the global situation has deteriorated dramatically and in many of the major economies that we monitor most closely, the chances of a recession has edged over from possible to probable.”
Dr Chalmers told Sky he had noted the fall-out from the British government’s mini-budget and tax cuts package. Delivered by Kwasi Kwarteng, it sparked an intervention from the Bank of England and warnings of a sharp increase in interest rates in early November.
“What’s happening there, I think is a cautionary tale about the costs and consequences of getting government policy and central bank policy out of whack, having fiscal and monetary policy working at cross purposes.
What on earth does the Chicken call his effort:
- running a huge deficit during rate hikes;
- allowing a war-profiteering energy shock to metastasise instead of taxing it out of existence,
- and, endorsing large tax cuts for the rich?
The Albanese Government has been swallowed by its own gas whale and, if it can get a word out at all, only gasps lie after lie to cover it.
