Labor’s full surrender to the fossil fuel industry has been a while in coming since it was elected in 2022, but is now complete: the party’s embrace of gas to 2050 and of the myth of carbon capture makes the Albanese government indistinguishable from the Morrison government — which Labor derided for its “gas-led recovery”.
Peter Dutton has attracted considerable criticism for his embrace of nuclear power, but at least nuclear power works and has a proven track record, albeit at extraordinary cost and with massive delays. Carbon capture, which is now central to Labor’s energy policy, is also extremely expensive — and has no track record of working anywhere in the world. Labor is embracing the one technology that’s even less plausible than nuclear power.
In a reverse takeover, federal Labor has now become a branch office of the rotten WA Labor Party, an outfit owned and run by the fossil fuel and extractive industries, its climate denialist billionaires and their propaganda outlets. The gas industry — Santos, Woodside, Origin, and multinational tax dodgers like Chevron, BP and Shell — is to be given carte blanche to develop new gas fields — and at taxpayer expense.
That’s because this isn’t just an empty announcement to win seats in Western Australia and Queensland. The gas giants won’t have to explore for new gas fields themselves. Santos, Woodside, Origin, Chevron, BP and Shell won’t have to spend a cent looking for new deposits — you’ll be paying for it instead. Yesterday, the prime minister and Resources Minister Madeleine King announced they were handing half a billion dollars over a decade to Geoscience Australia “to find new deposits of minerals and sources of energy to help build a Future Made in Australia”. The mapping will be both onshore and offshore, “to deliver data, maps and other tools for use by the resources industry that will point the way to new discoveries”.
Announcing the handout in Perth, Albanese said “our government will ensure their findings are freely available to industry. So companies know where to drill, dig and explore to find the mineral resources that will power our future growth and prosperity”.
Thank you, taxpayers.
For fossil fuel companies, it’s now the perfect rort, in every way: they have their mapping done for free, so they can extract gas on which they pay minimal tax (they get to dictate what rate of tax they think they should pay), while their political operatives in government pass laws to prevent climate protests and use police as a militia for polluters.
It’s not the first time, however, that Labor has handed geoscience information about our resource reserves to industry for free. As Clinton Fernandes detailed in his book Island off the Coast of Asia, in 1983 the Hawke government agreed to fund a continental margins program “to conduct offshore geological surveys and petroleum resource studies at taxpayers’ expense in order to encourage private corporations to explore for oil and gas in the seabed under Australia’s waters”. The results would be handed to industry for free — something to which both Treasury and the Department of Finance objected at the time.
Why, Treasury asked, should the government be “willing to accept higher risks than the industry which primarily stands to benefit from any success” and urged “a much more substantial level of cost recovery”. Finance complained that the level of cost recovery was just 5%.
Good luck finding out if Treasury and Finance asked the same questions 40 years later under Labor’s transparency-hostile approach to freedom of information.
In the 1970s, economists had pointed out that governments were providing more to resources companies by way of subsidies than they were receiving in tax. Australia was, as Gough Whitlam said in 1974, “paying to be exploited”. Whitlam’s successors are maintaining exactly that tradition.
And if regional communities and farmers don’t like having their land seized and their water poisoned for gas exploration and extraction, Albanese and King have something for them, too: “regional communities, farmers and First Nations peoples will be supported to manage their land and water resources, and be more fully informed about potential mining projects.”
They may not be given any choice about it, but at least they’ll be “informed”. At least Dutton is offering communities free power if they have to live next to a reactor.
The government has made a point of arguing that new gas is crucial to its “Future Made In Australia” protectionist fantasy. “A future made in Australia will need Australian gas,” is Madeleine King’s opening line in her op-ed for the Financial Review today. While the planet cooks faster and faster, Labor is embracing rotten climate policy to deliver rotten resources and tax policy in support of rotten economic policy. What a victory for fossil fuels.
Do you back Labor’s embrace of gas and carbon capture, or has the party let down its voters? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
