Ian Verrender

Well, firstly, I mean, everybody thinks that resources in the ground belong to the Commonwealth and belong to the people of Australia, which is kind of true.

But it actually gets down to a state basis because Australia is a federation of states.

And so it's the...

not Australians per se, but the people who live within the states.

Those resources belong to the states and shouldn't be governed for people who are just currently alive, but for future generations as well.

Now, how does it work?

Well, and how did that come about?

The East Coast gas exports come from gas that's supplied out of Bass Strait, out of New South Wales, out of Queensland.

So the gas all comes from each of those three states.

So obviously there was difficulty in trying to come to some kind of arrangement between the three states to get some kind of policy there.

But it was actively explored and decided, this is the Gillard government, they were already under pressure from iron ore taxes and the resources rent tax on iron ore.

And they very successfully managed to force the then Labor government to junk that resources rent tax, come up with a second best option, which was then completely thrown out when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister.

So the Labor government at the time looked at it and said, no, we're not going to have a reservation policy here.

Now, interestingly, over in the West, I have spoken to the then premier, Alan Carpenter, who was the person who imposed that tax.

And he told me this story about how

He was sitting in a room with, you know, the chief executive, senior executives from the biggest resources companies around the world about, this is really around Northwest Shelf and all of the offshore gas projects that happen there.

And apparently at one stage, you know, he said, look, we're going to have this gas reservation policy just to ensure that there's enough gas for Western Australians into the future.

And so for every bit of gas you export, there's going to be 10% of that reserved

Western Australians.

He said, somebody thumped the table and said, there will not be one molecule of gas that will be reserved for domestic use.