Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

For two years now, Labor has been warning of a looming crisis in the eastern Australian gas market and urging the government to take action. Even that far back, as far as 2015, it was becoming clear to us, at least, that the LNG exporters that had been set up in Gladstone were using gas that was previously supplied to Australian users—Australian manufacturing companies, Australian power generators and Australian households.

At our national conference in the middle of 2015, there was a full debate on this looming gas crisis about policy options that we would consider as an opposition going into the 2016 federal election to deal with this looming crisis. As I think most people observing this debate know, we adopted at that conference, and took to the federal election, a national interest test for gas exploration—a form of gas reservation to ensure that enough of eastern Australia's gas was going to be available to Australian businesses and Australian households before starting to ship it off overseas. The response from the Prime Minister was perhaps predictable: he rubbished it. He said it was old-style leftism. He had no other ideas, of course, because he thought—and he reassured the Australia people and Australian businesses—that everything was fine in the eastern Australian gas market.

Well, everything is not fine. We are now in a full-blown gas crisis in this country, and this government has been asleep at the wheel. Without decisive action, this crisis is going to have a devastating impact on the Australian economy and on thousands and thousands of Australian jobs. It has already become apparent in the power generation sector right across the National Electricity Market on the eastern seaboard. Power generation from gas-fired power over the last 12 months has fallen by more than one-third. It is impacting reliability—as we have seen across the NEM over the course of this summer—and it is the key factor driving electricity prices up across the NEM.

But it is a particularly severe crisis in manufacturing, particularly in manufacturing sectors that rely on gas not just for reliable and affordable electricity but also as a key feedstock. These manufacturing companies have operated for decades on the basis of an historic price of around $3 or $4 per gigajoule, which was the price that was in place when we left government in 2013. Under this government, prices have spiked.

Mr Frydenberg interjecting—

I hear the minister talking about parity pricing.

Mr Frydenberg interjecting—

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