James Campbell: Anthony Albanese is starting to reveal true colours when it comes to business

What we have learned with Anthony Albanese’s intervention on coal and gas prices is that if the government decides to target you there is very little business can do about it, writes James Campbell.

Any voters who might have thought that under an Albanese Government life would be much the same – just with less Scott Morrison in it – have been rudely disabused by the events of the past few weeks.

The first hint that Albo-time was going to be different came in September when the nation’s business leaders gathered in Canberra for the jobs summit.

Going into the summit the message from those lucky enough to be invited was how pleased and surprised they were feeling about the access they were getting from the new mob.

Imagine their surprise therefore when they were presented with an IR bill which appeared to have been drafted by the union movement.

With this government getting the meeting isn’t hard.

But, as the gas and coal industries found out last week, access doesn’t equal influence.

That the IR changes were made to measure for the labour movement made sense if you remember that, as the name implies, this is a Labor Government. Given it was clear they weren’t for turning, what was business going to do about it?

As one government relations man advised his clients at the time, did they really want to burn their bridges with the new administration less than six months in, given they are likely to be there for a while?

The sudden lurch into market intervention in the gas and coal markets is a different matter, not just because it seems to have caught business completely off guard.

It isn’t just that most informed observers think that putting a ceiling on wholesale gas and coal prices was either unnecessary or won’t work, though that seems to be the case.

It’s the sudden shuddering realisation that if the government decides to target you, there seems to be very little that you can do about it.

On the face of it this sense of helplessness is surprising.

Twelve years ago the last Labor government picked a fight with the mining industry with Kevin Rudd’s Resource Super Profits Tax of 40 per cent. The mining industry won that one after spending at least $22 million on advertising.

The campaign contributed to a drop in the government’s popularity that gave those inside Labor keen to see the back of him the opportunity to replace Rudd with Julia Gillard.

Having lived through that experience Anthony Albanese surely knows the risk he is running?

In reality the situation in 2022 is very different to 2010.

In the past two years politicians around the world discovered, much to their own surprise, that governments still have powers to order people about that many of us assumed could only be used in a time of war.

And, having exercised them to save us during the pandemic, the public seems keen for them to keep exercising them even though that crisis has passed.

In other words, if the governments can arbitrarily order rent holidays as it spends billions keeping people in their jobs, why can’t it intervene to do something about our gas bills?

The Government knows – as I suspect the energy companies do too – that research shows they are very unpopular with the public.

The beauty of the anti-mining tax campaign was it was focused on the workers. Why, the ads asked, was a Labor government going after an industry that was giving blue collar people jobs that paid more than they could have hoped for?

At the time the mining construction boom was going full steam ahead and getting a job in it was regarded as a Golden Ticket.

The gas and coal companies today are in a very different position.

Though they pay a lot of tax, very few Australians work in the industry.

When many people think of them it’s the sudden rise in their electricity bills that come to mind, not the export bonanza they’re bringing to the country.

In other words, on the face of it none of the conditions that made 2010 so successful are there today.

Which is why the gas industry can rant and rave all it likes about the imposition of a “Soviet-style policy,” in the short term there is nothing they can do about it.

The longer term is another matter of course. That this poses a real threat to further investment in the gas industry is no doubt correct unless everyone I have spoken to in the last week is lying.

It may also be the case that the industry is right and there will be gas shortages next year, though they would want to be careful about being seen to have engineered such a short fall. The problem with the long term consequences of course is they tend to be felt long after the politicians responsible for them have left office.

It won’t become clear that these are here until well after the next election. What we can say for certain is that trust between the business community and this government has been shaken by the events of the past 10 days.

The danger for the government is that it has shaken it without actually protecting consumers from prices because, even on its own modelling, the average power bill is still set to rise by $700 in next 18 months.

Originally published as James Campbell: Anthony Albanese is starting to reveal true colours when it comes to business