Bonus Ep: Punter’s Politics and the gas tax “ripping off” Aussies
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What is the main issue with gas companies in Australia?
It's not often politicians are taken to task by regular Australians on the issues that fill them with rage.
Politicians, people in front of me, going to work in the industries that they literally wrote the rules for. I've got a list of politicians who are still to this day, who were resource ministers, gas lobbyists.
But that's exactly what's happened at this week's Senate inquiry into taxing Australia's gas companies for their windfall war profits.
I'm not anti-gas. I'm pro getting paid what we're owed. This is capitalism 101. If we own the resource and it's ours, you pay us what you owe us.
Conrad Benjamin, a former high school teacher, gave evidence at the hearing and he didn't hold back.
We're about to hear that the global economy is going through a shock and we have to tighten our belts because something that happened overseas is making everything more expensive for us and we're about to be told that we can't afford anything. Except when we look at what we are as a nation, lots of resources that we all collectively own, we know it not to be true.
The self-proclaimed citizens lobbyist is making headlines around the country.
I think politicians ignore just how much we're paying attention to this at their own peril.
I'm Nicole Johnston, and you're listening to 7am. Today, in a special bonus episode, founder of Hunter's Politics, Conrad Benjamin, on why he thinks gas companies are ripping off Australia and the government is letting them get away with it. It's Thursday, April 23. Conrad, how does a former high school teacher end up in front of a Senate inquiry slamming the government for giving away the country's liquefied natural gas?
Well, I guess there's a few stages to it. Stage one is how I sort of got into making political content online. I was standing in front of a class of year 10 students a few years ago talking about the topic of externalities and how impacts of business decisions can impact other people outside of that transaction. And I was flicking through the textbook and there were rankings online. of how Australia's going on indexes of everything, clean air, clean water, women in the workforce, press freedom, you name it. And one student asked me after we reviewed everyone's results, he said, sir, does the government know that we're going backwards and everything? Why don't they just fix it? And it's at that moment where I kind of went home, being like, what do you want me to do?
So I went and emailed my local MP member and was like... What do you want me to tell them? Because if I'm going to be honest with them, I'm going to say the system isn't broken. It's working perfectly for your donors and for the lobbyists and for the corporations that get rich off pushing externalities onto us and we the taxpayers pay it. So that was sort of the beginning of getting such a lacklustre response. And then from there, I didn't think Aussies cared about politics. But I posted an Instagram reel one day about our gas situation, and that reel just went to a couple million sort of off the bat. God, as they said, if I taxed them, they'd leave me. Where are they going to go? To some other politically stable country with lots of space and billions of dollars of gas in the ground?
All right, all right, stop. From there for the last two years, it's just kind of grown exponentially. And then what puts me in front of a Senate inquiry? Well, I think all credit's got to go to a lobbyist. We raised $80,000 to employ a lobbyist and all of a sudden I'm on radio, I'm on TV and I'm in a Senate inquiry talking to politicians about how they should stop selling us out.
So it sounds like you partly went to the other side by getting your own lobbyist.
Oh, yeah. I am not afraid to use the tools of my enemies against them.
So you end up at a Senate inquiry. Why do you think it could even change anything?
As far as I understand it, Senate inquiries is what the government does to kick the can down the road to pretend to be doing something when they ultimately will do nothing. And so I think there was enough agitating with politicians who could see how popular this is and they managed to get an inquiry about why we're getting so scammed from our gas off the ground.
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