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Anthony Albanese rules out gas export tax on existing contracts and criticises ‘populist’ campaign (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 month ago by arbilp3@aussie.zone to c/australianpolitics@aussie.zone

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The Labor MP Ed Husic vowed to keep pushing for a 25% export levy, predicting the groundswell of public support would eventually be too hard for Albanese to ignore.

Husic challenged Albanese’s description of the gas tax campaign as “populist”, noting the same label was used to described Labor’s drive for a royal commission into the banks.

I am glad someone from Labor is sticking up for the levy. Over time, keeping in mind the international situation, the levy should continue to be kept front of mind for when some semblance of 'normality' returns.

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[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Unpopular decision, potentially smart politics:

Albo knows taxing gas exporters is a popular decision.

He also knows that:

The Greens are for it
The Liberals are against it
One Nation's follows are for it, but their politicians get paid by big resources execs and they'll withhold funding or move funding back to the liberal party if One Nation politicians back the tax on exporters.

The politically smart move for Albo now is to say they're not going to add the tax, then 6 months before the next election he switches to wanting it implemented and makes it one of their primary running issues.

The libs won't have any support for it (further hurting their chances of being elected)
People will say that One Nation is only pretending to support it since they get funding from the resource extraction sector.
And the greens will already be running on it with most of their preferences flowing to labor anyway.

[–] YeahToast@aussie.zone 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah that's an interesting take. It is political suicide to talk about taxing resources in any fashion.. so best to throw it out with a short time frame rather than letting resource companies run long term albo smear campaign. Now, having said that... If nothing gets taxed I'll flip the table

[–] thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 month ago

It has proven to be political suicide in the past, but given how fractured the right currently is in Australia - the ALP might just be able to get it through as a campaign promise next election.

[–] MisterFrog@aussie.zone 0 points 1 month ago

The fact that the Labor government won't do something very popular is evidence that it does not care about the wishes of the Australian people, and that we don't have real democracy in this country.

The cop out of "it's too hard" is tired. If they wanted, they could utilise popular opinion to tell the gas companies to get fucked, and that we'd happily buy and run the infrastructure ourselves, it'd be all the same employees, just minus the middle men. The people are clamoring for some radical reform.

The Labor party is a neo-liberal cente party though, so will never happen.

[–] arbilp3@aussie.zone 0 points 1 month ago

Hope you're on the money!