Labor’s promise of a ‘fairer’ gas deal
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I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am. Australia is one of the biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas in the world. Over the past 25 years, the value of those exports has grown more than 20-fold. Yet revenue from the tax designed to capture the extraordinary profits from petroleum resources has gone backwards. Now, this week at its national conference, the Labor Party has formally acknowledged that Australians deserve a fairer return from the resources beneath their own soil and seas. But the party stops short of backing a policy that forced the issue onto the agenda in the first place. A 25% tax on gas exports that supporters say could raise up to $17 billion a year. Today, Australian Institute co-chief executive Richard Dennis on the unlikely alliance pushing Labor to take on the gas industry and whether the party's carefully chosen words will ever become an actual tax.
It's Saturday, July 25th. Richard, you were at the ALP National Conference this week. What was the vibe like at the meeting?
Oh, I think there was a lot of excitement, a lot of Labor members who hadn't seen each other for a long time, been a while since there's a national conference. So there was definitely a lot of goodwill in the room, but at the same time, variously frustration and disappointment that the good old days where you could have a stoush and that people could see the competing arguments and And that people might even see the result shift because of the strength of public argument that those days seem to be behind, well, not just Australia, but Labor Party and the way they want to organize their conferences. So people talk about grassroots. People talk about the base. Well, this is the grassroots and this is the base.
And they wanted to talk about gas. They wanted to talk about Gaza. They wanted to talk about gambling. And the big kids were saying, calm down, fella. The prime minister... doesn't want a distraction. Lots of people had different priorities, but between them, they couldn't agree on what to force on the party as a whole.
One thing that the National Conference this week agreed to was to put a commitment in the party platform to secure Australians a, quote, fairer return from natural resources through appropriate taxation arrangements.
What did Labor formally pledge about a 'fairer return' at the national conference?
It didn't endorse the 25% gas export tax being pushed by unions and some Labor MPs. So can you strip that language down for us? What does Labor actually agree to by using that language and putting forward that commitment?
Look, what they've agreed to do is to make it fairer. I think the two letters do a lot of work in that sentence. So, look, it's a statement of intent. It's a statement of direction of travel. But by definition, you know, that language has no timetable and it doesn't have a destination. So what I think it is is, you know, quite a big public nudge from the party to the parliamentary wing, come on, do better, try harder, negotiate harder, take the pain, go get a better deal for Australians rather and you'd have to force those foreign-owned gas companies to pay more.
Why did the conference stop short of endorsing a 25% gas export tax?
So to be clear, the 25% gas export tax is the ACTU's formal position. The ACTU executive have adopted that. The affiliate unions are broadly behind it. The left and right are Blue-collar unions are supporting it. The service sector unions, the white-collar unions are very supportive because they know that the only way teachers and nurses are going to get a pay rise is if the government collects enough tax. The NDIS sector knows it's going to get huge cuts because unless the government can find new sources of revenue. So it's united the left and right of the union movement. It's united the blue collar and the white collar of the union movement. It's certainly got the branches excited, but the prime minister knows how to manage a labor conference.
He managed to avoid what he might think of as a messy debate about it. But I think messy is what democracy looks like.
Well, yeah, I mean, I miss the coverage from the good old days of the old Labor conferences where there were just blues on the floor everywhere and I make great viewing, but that's another point.
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