Ian Verrender

Now originally it was supposed to be in place early next year so it's actually been delayed by around about six months.

The problem here is that there are three gas exporters on the east coast.

You've got one that's led by Origin, you've got another one that's led by Shell and a third one that's led by Santos.

Now

The Origin and Shell Lead Consortia both provide gas into the East Coast system.

It's the Santos Export Consortium that does not, because the problem is that Santos miscalculated the amount of gas that it could access in the ground.

It built a facility that was too big for the gas that they had access to.

And then they wrote export contracts off the back of that very large export facility to be able to pay for it.

And of course, what happened was they didn't have enough gas.

So what the Santos Consortium does is that it buys gas out of the domestic system.

And that is why we've had these problems with gas, if not outright shortages, squeeze supply, at least, you know, on the East Coast.

It's odd because the government has been reluctant to do really anything much when it comes to gas and gas exports.

I think the experience from years ago in taxing, trying to tax iron ore exports and a mineral resources rent tax back in the Gillard and Rudd era,

They've really been burnt by that experience.

I think the export tax idea is a much neater idea and probably a far more effective one because essentially any exporter would pay a certain amount of tax on their exports, which would then automatically mean that they would

make sure there was plenty of gas going into the domestic market because they wouldn't be taxed on the domestic sales.

So that would be a much neater way of doing it.

And it would also raise quite a bit of revenue, the revenue that we forego as compared to countries like Norway, Qatar, our biggest competitors in this field.

So that would have been a much neater way to do it.

For some reason or other, the government seems to think that if they do that, it would be detrimental to our exports and it would make our gas more expensive overseas.