Ian Verrender

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.

But as some commentators point out, there's only one price of gas.

There's not the Norway price of gas, which is gas plus 78% tax.

So it would be the companies that would have less profits rather than the buyers being forced to pay more.

So anyway, we've gone down this path, but the details of this have yet to be fully worked out because how does Santos provide a 20% of its uncontracted

Thanks, Keratin.

See you later.

And I'm Ian Verinder, the ABC chief business correspondent.

I think it was a really quite important and, in fact, a monumental meeting yesterday outlining where they think the economy is headed because what it proves or what it shows is that nobody's got the faintest idea.

Seriously, I mean, there are so many parameter shifts, both to the negative and both to the positive, and they even admit in the statement that the uncertainty parameters have just blown right out, that no one knows...

has the foggiest idea of where this is going.

What we do know is that the choices that the Reserve Bank have to make are becoming far more difficult than they've been for many, many years.