You couldn’t write a worse script for the Albanese Government.
- It came to power as a gas and coal energy crisis took hold.
- It ignored it and instead focussed on crushing wages triggering a massive real income shock.
- Panicked, it put a captured resources minister in charge of fixing the gas shock who then made it much worse, before disappearing on a junket.
- Satisfied it was fixed, the government ignored the energy shock again in its budget which contained huge price hikes for energy.
- As anger grew in households, it panicked again and put four ministers in charge of fixing the gas shock while nothing was done about coal.
- As state leaders ripped each other apart in the policy vacuum, the new idea was hatched to jawbone the gas and coal war profiteers into lowering prices.
- But the ministers doing the jawboning all said different shit then exited the country leaving the message on the cutting room floor.
And now we come to steps 8, 9 and 10 in how to completely screw up a policy response.
Step 8 is to tell everybody what you’re doing even though you’re away and not doing it:
Step 9 is to put the same captured buffoon resources minister back into the fray to wreck any consensus:
Labor is moving to force energy retailers to justify price hikes after the sector was outed by the competition watchdog as key culprits for surging bills in a report that undermines claims the nation’s gas producers are war profiteering.
In findings that blunt manufacturing industry accusations of gouging by big producers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found the average agreed-upon down-stream retailers’ price for gas to be delivered in 2023 jumped at almost nine times the pace of producers’ rates.
“It is essential retailers are captured as part of any transparency measure,” says Resources Minister Madeleine King, who met this week with Japan’s minister for energy and trade Yasutoshi Nishimura. Michael Smith
,,,In a separate interview, in Japan, Ms King warned against unintended consequences of hitting the coal and gas industry with taxes.
“Knee jerk reactions like taxes can have other ramifications. We need more investment in industry, so sudden changes to taxation systems can cause a break on this.”
Giving the liars an immediate leg-up:
“The latest ACCC data shows the prices actually being paid for gas supply contracts next year are well below what has been publicly claimed,” said Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch.
“Most businesses have supply locked in at lower prices on long-term contracts that cover 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the market and were still being offered at the start of this year for supply in 2022 between $6.70 per gigajoule and $9.40 per gigajoule.”
In the AEMO bid stack that drives electricity pricing, it is the marginal bidder supplied with spot gas and coal prices that sets the price. Mad King should be sacked for the third time in six months.
Finally, Step 10 in your policy failure is to all fuck off overseas – that is, Mad King, Chicken Chalmers, Bovver Bowen and Cowardly Albo – while the lobbies launch their propaganda assault:
Resources companies are preparing to replicate and exceed the $22m anti-mining tax campaign that led to Kevin Rudd’s demise if the Albanese government imposes new taxes and multi-employer bargaining on miners.
MCA chief executive Tania Constable said until the government ruled out new taxes, the mining sector would “push back hard”.
‘Taxing exports of Australian coal will do nothing to address the domestic supply or price issues impacting Australians. More than 85 per cent of Australian coal is exported. Coal supplied to the domestic market is done so under long-term contracts at prices much lower than the current high international prices,” Ms Constable said.
She said a tax on mining would “exacerbate the cost of living crisis” and ensure job losses at a time “when families are doing it tough”.
I hope Albo’s idiots are enjoying their trips away because they are about to walk back into a mining shitstorm of their own creation and any promise to reduce energy prices is entirely up for grabs.
