Santos chief Kevin Gallagher calls on Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton to restore open markets
Our next leader must reverse the trends that are ruining Australia’s living standards and killing productivity, the man behind gas giant Santos says.
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Australians’ living standards are being crushed by excessive bureaucratic red tape that is killing productivity across the economy, says the head of the state’s biggest business.
Santos chief Kevin Gallagher is urging the winner of a federal election to be held within weeks to reverse this damaging trend by restoring open markets to give confidence to job-creating investors.
In agenda-setting comments ahead of The Advertiser’s Building a Bigger, Better South Australia forum on Friday, Mr Gallagher urged attendees Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton to focus on streamlining regulatory approvals and compliance processes to restore investor confidence in Australia.
Mr Gallagher also called for more investment in Australian carbon capture and storage (CCS), after Santos and partner Beach Energy on January 31 officially opened the Moomba project, in the state’s far northeast.
“Our nation is built on foreign investment and trust in Australia as a safe place to invest. But, as an example, asset and corporate deals in the oil and gas sector, as well as exploration, have ground to a halt with investors seeing it as too risky because of regulatory uncertainty,” he told The Advertiser.
“Red and green tape, reversal of approvals and rule changes after investment decisions are made are killing productivity across the economy.
“Living standards in Australia have been falling and to reverse the trend, it’s all about the economy – restoring open, competitive markets, focusing on our comparative advantages, including resources and bringing investors back.”
Mr Gallagher, Adelaide-based Santos’s managing director and chief executive officer, cited as an example of crushing red tape the more than 180 approvals from multiple regulators required for the multibillion-dollar Barossa gas project off the Northern Territory.
The controversial Environmental Defenders Office failed in a legal bid to block the $5.7bn Barossa project, which Santos on Wednesday said was on schedule for first gas by the third quarter of this year.
“The costs of compliance are also killing productivity. Every day, our gas marketers at Santos have to meet around 800 compliance and reporting obligations for every single transaction, to meet the requirements of three separate regulators,” Mr Gallagher said.
“And the rules are changing all the time. At the start of 2024, we were working to version 72 of the National Gas Rules. Today, our gas marketers are working off version 82.”
The Moomba CCS project, one of the world’s largest, was saving 20,000 tonnes of CO2 every 4.3 days – the equivalent to that saved annually by SA’s 11,000 electric vehicles.
“The world wants a faster energy transition, and carbon capture and storage is one of few technologies available now that can deliver decarbonisation at scale for hard-to-abate sectors, like steel and cement,” Mr Gallagher said.
“We need to be investing more in CCS in Australia to decarbonise not only our own industries, but those of the giant, energy-consuming nations of Asia.”
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Originally published as Santos chief Kevin Gallagher calls on Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton to restore open markets
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