In among her acknowledgements at the National Press Club this week, beside her ministerial colleagues and senior public servants, Resources Minister Madeleine King thanked “representatives of the resources sector, in particular the Minerals Council of Australia and the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies”.
It would be a jarring start to a speech announcing the Albanese government’s gas reservation policy, except these mining bodies probably helped write it and are deserving of the recognition. Certainly, it was written more for them than for Australia.
The reservation policy exists because the government won’t properly tax gas exports and it won’t properly tax gas exports because foreign mining companies have told it not to. Correspondence between the government and the gas giant Santos makes very clear who is in charge and who is taking instructions. Politics remains the industry’s only successful example of capture and storage.
A gas tax, levied at 25 per cent, would be effective and popular and would not happen while Labor is in charge. The gas industry can be reassured that it wouldn’t happen under the Coalition, either.
The mining lobby has effectively positioned gas as a necessary bridging fuel, a fudge that is really about delaying transition to renewables and extending the life of fossil fuels. At the National Press Club King falsely said gas is needed “to continue heating our homes”.
She painted a picture of a country reliant on gas, both domestically and for stability in the region. “A successful, peaceful energy transition relies on continued Australian exports of energy,” she said, repeating an industry talking point. “We must continue exporting traditional commodities – like gas and coal – while our export markets still need them, and while our regional trading partners follow their important paths to net zero.”
King is like a pigeon guarding a fox guarding the hen house. The fox has succeeded in making the reservation policy a ceiling rather than a floor and ensuring that the pigeon can give special carve-outs to companies that have already committed to overseas gas supply.
The policy itself is not bad, it’s just the wrong policy. It’s the one industry wants, instead of paying properly for the exploitation of Australia’s resources. At the press club, King gave a storybook account of this history. Australian society was built from gold rushes and the first coal sent to India in 1799. “Since Indigenous Australians mined ochre for art, and flint and stone for tools,” she said, “trading in resources has been integral to the development of this nation.”
Here again are the false equivalences of a minister who has never met a fossil fuel she didn’t want to dig up. Comparing the gathering of ochre to the mass exploitation of gas reserves is like comparing her government’s policies to the national interest.
Along with the rest of Labor, she is completely indifferent to the urgent threat of climate change. If they were even pretending to understand, they would stop approving coal and gas projects. Instead, they’re at the National Press Club acknowledging the important presence of the Minerals Council of Australia, the body that chased them out of office the last time they tried to fairly tax resources.