Why is Scotty from Marketing attacking gas reservation?

Australia has long had a problem with what to do with former prime ministers, but it appears Scotty from Marketing takes the cake.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison says Labor’s plans for a domestic gas reservation scheme pose a threat to the country’s long-standing and close energy supply partnership with Japan.

Morrison, who is vice chairman at American Global Strategies (AGS) and a strategic adviser to international and domestic firms, named the gas reservation scheme, the revised safeguard mechanism and royalties on gas in Queensland as three central issues causing consternation for Australia’s biggest LNG customer.

AGS is a gang of former Trump 1.0 senior officials dedicated to influencing policy at the highest levels. It is lobbying on steroids.

Let’s recall that when he was PM, the Liar from the Shire promised a gas reservation scheme in return for Senator Rex Patrick’s sign-off on Stage 3 tax cuts. Morrison then pretended it never happened.

Before joining AGS, Morrison had close relationships with Japanese companies that were invested in Australian LNG.

In Japan in 2022, Morrison met with Japanese business partners (he said), including INPEX, Kawasaki, Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi, ENEOS, J-Power, Itochu, and Sumitomo, and explicitly linked those discussions to energy security in the Indo-Pacific.

INPEX is Japan’s largest upstream oil and gas company and operator of Ichthys LNG, while several of those other companies are major Japanese energy/resource investors.

Morrison was also personally involved in the 2018 Ichthys LNG launch with Shinzo Abe. INPEX’s history records Morrison and Abe attending the Darwin ceremony.

AGS has an Economic Security strategic partnership (KES) with Shigeru Kitamura, who is the former Japanese National Security Adviser and Secretary-General of the National Security Secretariat, and before that Japan’s Director of Cabinet Intelligence.

KES says it has “steadily expanded its client base across a wide range of industries and regions”

However, KES does not name its clients.

Morrison joined AGS in January 2024, after which he met Kitamura.

Morrison subsequently went to Tokyo and Singapore specifically while working on projects in his AGS role, and thanked KES for supporting his Tokyo visit. He spoke at the Yomiuri International Economic Society symposium about economic security and the Indo-Pacific.

There is no direct link between Morrison and KES’ LNG clients, if they exist, but you get the picture. There are some very high-level energy relationships here.

Scotty from Marketing is registered in the Australian Government Lobbyists Register and the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, but as a representative of Saudi Aramco and various tanks plus PNG, not of Japanese interests.

Then again, he wouldn’t need to register if an LNG interest were a private entity.

LNG majors are very active in lobbying Canberra and have several firms on the payroll.

As I dug for this information, I came across another infuriating fact.

Australian officials questioned the Japanese practice of on-selling Aussie LNG to third-party customers in 2024.

JERA, the largest Japanese LNG purchasing firm, argued that it needs to on-sell Australian LNG to third-party customers because of the Strategic Buffer LNG (SBL), Japan’s emergency LNG reserve, which was legislated in 2023.

Japan doesn’t have large underground gas storage. Instead, the SBL pays a private LNG buyer — JERA — to maintain additional LNG in its commercial portfolio, which can be ordered to Japan if needed.

That is, Japan has created a floating domestic reserve of Australian gas.

And now our former PM, who is hobnobbing with Japanese interests regularly, is telling us we suck because we might want a domestic reservation of our own, with our own gas.

As my old Nan used to say, you are the company you keep.