The east coast is in the middle of the worst energy shock ever outside of the Ukraine War with no end in sight.
The gas price is still hovering around $20Gj, miles above the supposed $12Gj cap:
Electricity prices are going higher still if nothing is done:
The political economy is completely lost on the issue.
Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy said he did not believe the success of gas market intervention over the past nine months would deter investment in new supply.
Nor does he expect inflation to tick up when energy bill rebates and price caps end in 2024/25.
He rejected criticism price caps on the cost of the gas and coal that fires the country’s power plants had rearranged inflation rather than lowering it.
Earth to Treasury. There is no gas price cap. It’s caput. Moreover, the coal price cap is useless without it because gas sets the marginal price of electricity.
The Opposition is saying the right thing but offers no detail about how to release more gas so it is little more than opportunistic.
Shadow Climate Change and Energy Minister Ted O’Brien says if the Coalition were in power, they would be “doing everything” to ensure there’s an increased supply of gas in the marketplace.
“We need more supply,” Mr O’Brien told Sky News host Chris Kenny.
The Greens are also making sense, criticising the Woodside carve-out from PRRT changes.
Meanwhile, the evil Woodside itself is now so emboldened by Albo’s weak response to its violation of east coast gas price laws that it trying to break the WA gas reservation policy, where prices have doubled to $10Gj in recent weeks.
Wesfarmers has accused Western Australia’s LNG heavyweights of failing to meet their obligations under the state’s much-vaunted domestic gas reservation policy.
The Perth-based conglomerate said WA’s Labor government needed to do more to enforce the reservation policy, and that its failure to do so had contributed to sharp increase in gas prices.
Why there is not more pushback against the cartel on the east coast from affected corporations is a mystery to me.
If nothing is done to force the gas cartel to stop breaking the law then a massive recession is inevitable as the RBA “makes room” for an energy price shock that will add 4% to inflation in the next year.
This will mean a cash rate well north of 5%, a double-dip housing correction, a banking crisis, and a consumption crash.
All to feed the insatiable greed of a foreign-owned, China-beholden, earth destroying, fossil fuel cartel.
