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Mr Sugahara, who is chief executive and chairman of the Japanese trading giant’s Australian operations, is the first representative of a major Asian buyer of LNG to voice concern over the proposed changes. He has previously made clear that Japan will need a secure supply of LNG from Australia for decades to come, and also anticipates Australia will be a major source of supply of low-carbon ammonia, which is expected to be crucial for the decarbonisation of Japanese industry. “While I have no intention to intervene in domestic politics, I take the position that government intervention in markets can have unintended consequences,” he told The Australian Financial Review when asked about the ADGSM reforms. “From a Japanese corporate perspective, I am personally concerned that short-term interventions may jeopardise business practices which have been built over the long term.”

Senex chief executive Ian Davies, in a blunt submission to the government’s gas market consultation that closed last week, urged Labor to avoid crashing the industry as it scrambles to meet demand in coming years.
“Senex’s EOI process demonstrates there is no market failure for gas supply from 2025 and therefore no case for heavy-handed and enduring market intervention,” he wrote.

“I didn’t know anyone other than my family in this huge country I now called home.” After finishing high school in Bunbury, Ms Farquhar became the first member of her family to attend a university UWA. After four years in management consulting, she took a FIFO job at Rio Tinto where she worked on the Hope Downs project Rio co-owns with Dalkeith billionaire Gina Rinehart. “Being a young female certainly had its challenges,” she said.

The Albanese government’s intervention in the national energy market has come under a withering attack from the country’s peak oil and gas group, which says the decision has already repelled vital investment in Australia and will lead to further economic pain in the form of energy price hikes. Speaking to the senate select committee on the cost of living on Friday, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch said Senex Energy’s decision to suspend its $1bn Atlas expansion project in Queensland was a sign of things to come following December’s price cap. She added that longstanding investors in Australia such as Japan had begun to look to the Middle East for more reliable investment conditions. Ms McCulloch said it was “particularly chilling” from an industry perspective that under the intervention, prices could be set arbitrarily by the regulator as opposed to the market.

IT takes a monstrous stupidity – a religious mania – for Australians in this gas-rich country to run short of gas from as soon as two years from today. Sure enough, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission now predicts that somewhere between 2024 and 2034 our southern states will have just half the gas they need. Oh, and that’s the best case.

Mining companies have warned about closures and damaging ­impacts on exports, competitiveness and regional economies if they are forced to move too ­quickly under a new safeguard mechanism designed to achieve Labor’s 2030 and 2050 emissions-­reduction targets. Miners, who helped deliver an $11.5bn budget improvement since October on the back of ­surging exports, have called on Labor and the Coalition to secure long-term investment certainty through bipartisan agreement on the safeguard mechanism.

Gas producer Senex Energy has pulled about $200 million of purchase orders for its stalled Atlas project in Queensland, sources close to the company say, as evidence firms of investment drying up after last month’s gas market intervention by the Albanese government. The move by Senex, owned by South Korean steel giant Posco alongside Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Energy, comes as Cooper Energy put a proposed gas project under review off Victoria, citing the shock move to effectively regulate market prices on the east coast on an ongoing basis.

Speaking at the National Mining Day celebrations last year, Rinehart said green activists are, on the one hand, “proving a boon to the mining industry” while, on the other hand, “moving on many fronts to diminish mining,” including through the education system. “Many governments around the world, as they throw taxpayers’ money on green this and that policies to get their countries deeper into debt ensuring for the next generations to be saddled with higher taxes, will require massive investments in mining if their green policies are to be achieved. So why make it more and more difficult with onerous and increasing government burdens?”

The Victorian Energy Minister last week issued a statement that must rank among the most misleading made by a federal or state politician in recent times. The minister was misleading gas users both in Victoria and NSW but I fear she also misled the Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen, whose gas price curbs are a mess because the gas supply situation is totally different to coal. When governments either state or federal act in a way that deliberately misleads the public it damages our democracy. But it also damages the media when journalists are simply not courageous enough to take on state or federal ministers when they conceal their real motivations.

15 January 2023.