Albanese’s gas mess just the first of many

With a trainee treasurer and a PM who hasn’t a clue about the most basic interest rate in the economy, it’s no surprise that the government’s scheme to cap gas prices is such a mess.

What could possibly have gone wrong?

A trainee treasurer, an energy minister who thinks it’s a fantastic idea to string a 4000km extension cord to Singapore, and a prime minister who hasn’t a clue about the most basic interest rate in the economy, cook up a scheme to supposedly cap gas prices?

Oh yes, and advised - for want of a better word – by the same utterly inept Treasury that came up with a flawed and obviously so from the get-go JobKeeper scheme that poured something north of $40bn straight down the toilet?

And the whole dangerously dodgy ramshackle Heath Robinson structure starts imploding almost immediately.

Yes, we have successfully capped the price you will pay for gas; pity that you won’t actually be able to get any.

Who could possibly have guessed?

Well, I did sort of suggest back in early December that it mightn’t work quite so brilliantly.

Although I did pull my punches a tad, by tentatively suggesting that it was “short-term stupidity wrapped up within long-term lunacy”.

As you can see, just the mildest of criticisms.

I wasn’t of course on my lonesome. All sorts of other players suggested that this simplistic –I have to add, that’s the brand of the current Treasury – blunt price cap would have all sorts of, needless to say unwelcome, ‘unintended consequences’.

True, many of them were ‘speaking their own book’. Nobody selling something wants it to have a price cap.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Nikki Short

But then, ‘speaking your book’ were precisely the people who were going to act in response to what the government was imposing.

They are precisely the ones who are not going to sell their product if they find the price unattractive– far less, spend money finding and developing more of the stuff.

Just think of it in terms of property.

If the government imposed price caps on property, do you think, do you really thunk, owners would be rushing to sell?

And that’s precisely what’s happened.

The first bit – not going out of your way to sell more stuff into the market, now; the second bit – not spending money to produce more gas, going forward.

I doubt that our intrepid trio have the slightest idea of just how stupid they announced and continue to announce themselves to be.

First, as their fundamental policy objective: we want to eliminate all and every bit of use of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal.

But heck, we are outraged that their prices are going up – forget about Russia and Ukraine, because we are united in stopping the development of more supply in Australia.

Have any of the trio heard of the basic laws of demand and supply? That if you restrict supply, prices go up?

Apparently not.

They think that they can simultaneously prohibit development of new gas, coal and oil, but demand unlimited volumes continue to be provided to the market and at prices plucked out of the air.

It’s as if they’ve spent their entire lives cocooned in the 1960s Soviet Union or the 1970s, all the way through to today, Cuba.

Do you want to be afraid, really afraid?

They are only getting started. We are 8 months – less than 25 per cent – into a three year Labor-Green term.

I don’t know which is worse: when our peripatetic PM is out of the country, seemingly most weeks?

So the trainee treasurer and the “I’m still upbeat and excited” about the proposed extension cord to Singapore twerp are left to run free?

Or when he pays the occasional visit home to, say, appoint Kevin Rudd to Washington, putting the old disastrous team from 2013 back together?

Say what you like about the disastrous Whitlam team; at least we didn’t get them back a decade later.