Gas prices have tripled in a decade, and while gas companies make record profits from exporting it overseas, it has hit Australians right in the hip pocket.
Both the Labor and Liberal parties have failed to stand up to the big gas corporations. But Peter Dutton’s plans to open huge new areas of gas development and gut environmental safeguards will only serve to boost the profits of gas corporations even further.
Most of Australia’s gas, around 80%, is exported. More gas just means more profits for the gas industry while they pay little to no tax. [1] For example, in 2022-23 gas corporations exporting from Queensland paid zero company tax on $36 billion of income. [2]
The polluting gas industry is making record profits while Australians pay the price.
Experts have said even Peter Dutton’s proposed gas reservation policy, which was announced without any details or modelling, will likely fail. [3]
The only real long-term solution to cutting energy costs and helping Australians reduce their bills is to support households to ditch expensive gas, and accelerate the shift to the cheapest form of energy – which is from wind, solar and storage. [4]
METHANE Gas, a disaster for our climate
Not only is it expensive, gas is an extremely polluting fuel which damages our climate.
As a greenhouse gas, methane is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and it leaks into the atmosphere through the whole gas supply chain – from gas mining fields, to through the transmission and distribution pipelines, and from appliances in homes.
Current evidence suggests that methane gas is just as bad, and possibly worse, for our climate than coal!
Victorians are already facing the impacts of unnatural disasters driven by global heating, including flash flooding, declining winter rainfall, more extreme heatwaves and bushfires.
Any plans to expand the gas industry is a plan to make these problems worse and put more people at risk.
And that is exactly what Peter Dutton’s is doing by promising to give public funding to foreign-owned gas corporations and override communities by speeding up approvals for gas mining.
So far during the election Peter Dutton has promised to:
- Rapidly approve huge polluting gas projects by gutting environmental safeguards
- Open up huge new areas of gas development, like fracking in the Beetaloo Basin which would cause pollution equivalent to adding eight million new petrol cars to our roads.
- Despite the gas industry making billions in profits, Peter Dutton wants to give the industry more free handouts by spending $1 billion of public funds on more gas infrastructure.