‘Back to the Future' A review of Australian reservation and other natural gas export control policies

Abstract

Despite record levels of domestic production, forecasters are predicting that the east coast Australian gas market will remain tight in 2019. The introduction of the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism (ADGSM) by the Federal Government in 2017, and the proposal announced by the Australian Labour Party (ALP) to bolster the mechanism, have again thrust the issue of political intervention in the export gas market into sharp focus. This paper provides an overview of the current regulatory intervention at the state and federal level, and looks back at the history of controls imposed upon the Australian gas export market. The paper is divided into two parts: Part 1, which looks at current regulatory controls engaged by various State and Federal governments: (a) the development and implementation of the ADGSM; (b) the development and implementation of the Queensland Government’s Prospective Gas Production Land Reserve policy (PGPLR); and (c) the Government of Western Australia’s (WA Government) domestic gas policy. The paper also reviews policy announcements made by the ALP in the lead up to the 2019 Federal election. Part 2 provides a broad overview of the history of controls on gas exports in Australia, from the embargo on exports from the North West Shelf between 1973 and 1977, through the increasing liberalisation of Australian energy policy during the 1980s and 1990s (and the associated conflict with state concerns of ensuring sufficiency of the domestic supply of gas), up to the removal of federal controls on resources exports (including liquefied natural gas) in 1997.