Albo has not piked it on gas reservation…yet

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The Albanese government is captured and is gutless:

A gas reservation scheme that is implemented only on a prospective basis would do little to solve Australia’s east coast gas shortage, experts warn.

Energy minister Chris Bowen on Sunday ruled out retrospective reservation of gas but left the door open to prospective changes to “see what more can be done” to keep gas in Australia.

Rick Wilkinson, EnergyQuest chief executive, said ruling out retrospective changes was an “important admission that reservation is extremely difficult to do”. But with new projects and expiring contracts a long way off, a prospective change was “unlikely to solve the problem” of Australia’s east coast gas shortage, he said.

That’s not true. The Dutton proposal used an export levy to force an excess of gas locally every year from existing spot exports.

That can still work to keep the rump of gas flowing because it is based upon ensuring an overall surplus of local gas.

It really is a spectacular piece of policymaking that shows how easy it is to do domestic reservation.

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If you don’t do reservation and enable LNG imports instead, then the fallout will be monumental.

Albo has not piked it…yet.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.