Surely the first response to forecasts of a shortage of gas in Australia should be: let’s get more gas out of the ground! Let’s brush aside the senseless go-slows by the Coalition government in NSW and the bone-headed development bans in Victoria, to develop more gas to supply their manufacturing heartlands.

Instead of attacking the political source of the supply problem, however, the new federal government has drummed up a questionable Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report to give the impression that collusion between big energy companies is the villain, and so threaten to force them to divert contracted export orders onto the domestic market.