It’s not all that surprising that Victorian Labor government MPs have sought a change in leadership, replacing Jacinta Allan with her deputy Ben Carroll. A range of polling on the voting intentions of Victorians indicates that the Labor government is in serious trouble.
As an example, polling by Freshwater Strategy gave Labor a primary vote of just 23 per cent, with One Nation ahead of them at 25 per cent and the Liberal-National Coalition in front at 27 per cent.
Polling commissioned by the Victorian Unions from Redbridge indicated One Nation is actually leading with a primary vote of 27% while Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition were both on 26% and the Greens had just 13%.
But what is truly staggering is that the people indicating a preference for One Nation are essentially voting for an empty chair. One Nation does not have a single seat in the lower house of the Victorian Parliament and just one representative in its upper house. It hasn’t even nominated a person that would be the leader of its Party in the Victorian Parliament after the next election.
One Nation’s Victorian campaign website, entitled “our team,” instead leads with photos of its two Queensland senators in the federal parliament – Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts – as part of the Victorian leadership team.
In terms of policy, One Nation has largely built a name for itself through calling for restrictions on immigration – an area that isn’t even within the power of the Victorian Parliament to control.
So if you are keen to vote for a party which can’t tell you the actual people you’ll be voting for, and won’t be able to put in place the restrictions on immigration that constitute its main policy position – then what are you voting for?
Well, what’s clear is you’re voting out of complete frustration and anger at other main party options that you’ve come to feel don’t give a crap about you.
People in Victoria, like much of the rest of the country, are incredibly angry, in large part because their wages haven’t been keeping up with rising cost of the essential products they need to buy.
The problem, though, is that based on the slogans and statements One Nation’s national MPs have provided, they’ll make things worse, particularly when it comes to energy.
Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce look to be very close on a personal basis to one of their main political funders – Gina Rinehart. For Joyce this went as far as him personally intervening in a dispute between Rinehart and her children where he urged one of her daughters to drop a court case opposing Gina’s changes to control over a family trust.
For Hanson it includes holidaying with Riehart across the south of Europe, staying in luxury hotels and attending luxury fashion label shows.
Rinehart has made most of her money from the iron ore interests she inherited from her father. But what many people don’t realise is that in the last few years she has been building up significant financial interests in gas companies (see this article from Forbes Magazine – Australian Billionaire Gina Rinehart is Building a Big Gas Business).
Now I don’t know if Gina Rinehart’s generous donations and her close personal ties to Hanson and Joyce influence their decisions on policy. But what I do know is that the financial interests of major shareholders in gas companies aren’t served by lower energy prices.
I suspect Hanson, Joyce and their rather interesting side kick Malcolm Roberts would still hold incredibly negative opinions about solar, wind and batteries irrespective of what Gina Rinehart was up to.
After all, it takes someone special to believe that the adoption of solar, batteries and wind power is part of global conspiracy by bankers and socialists (not odd at all that those two groups would want to co-operate?) to impose a global government to rule over the top of us.
But what should concentrate the minds of Victorian voters on this topic is that the state sits in an incredibly vulnerable position, right now, on gas.
Victorian households are incredibly dependent on gas for keeping their homes and their showers warm. Victorian households consume more gas to keep their houses warm than those in England or the Netherlands, even though their cities are cold enough that it periodically snows.
Household average gas use by end use – gigajoules per household per year
Source: Infrastructure Victoria (2021) Towards 2050: Gas infrastructure in a zero emissions economy – Interim report
And while in the past Victoria has had plentiful supplies of gas largely from the Bass Strait, that gas is on the verge of running out as forecasts from Australian Energy Market Operator and a range of other analysts have warned.
This means Victoria will have to increasingly rely on imports either from Queensland (where Rinhart’s gas business Senex has fields), or via international imports (with the Middle East a likely source) via liquefied national gas tankers.
AEMO forecast of Victorian gas supply versus demand
Source: AEMO (2026) Victorian Gas Planning Report Update
What makes Victorians even more vulnerable is that one of the three coal-fired power stations that supplies a significant amount of the state’s electricity – Yallourn – is getting extremely old, with some units now 52 years old. The plant has been subject to a range of dangerous incidents over the past decade indicative of a power station and mine that is suffering from age-related problems.
It will get increasingly difficult and expensive to keep this power plant going and worker safety will be put at greater risk. The risk is real, with a worker having died due to an explosion at this plant back in 2018.
No doubt One Nation’s leadership will make some glib remark that we should just build another coal power station to replace Yallourn. This is utterly unrealistic given no power company operating in Australia is interested in building such a plant and bank finance would be hard to obtain given the high levels of carbon pollution associated with using brown coal.
Yes the government could always fund such a power plant but that runs counter to the claims of both One Nation and the Liberal-National Coalition that Victoria’s debt is unbearably and irresponsibly high.
The Labor Government is looking to replace Yallourn with a private sector build-out of wind, solar, batteries as well as extra transmission lines, including scope for greater imports from NSW via a new interconnector – VNI West.
But if those things don’t happen, then the electricity will need to come from gas power plants – and where is that extra gas going to come from? We also might ask where is the extra gas power capacity is going to come from given the lead times to obtain gas turbines have blown out beyond five years (and their cost has blown out by 50%).
The change of leader by the Labor Party is, I suspect, unlikely to change the minds of those contemplating voting for One Nation. But One Nation can’t change the geological reality that Victoria’s gas supplies are running out and the alternatives will be significantly more expensive (and less secure) than what Victorians have been used to. They also can’t change physics that mean coal power stations progressively wear out and become increasingly unreliable and dangerous at the age Yallourn has now reached.
The two realities of physics and geology also confront the Liberal-National Coalition if they were to be elected to govern. The Coalition have said they’ll roll back Labor’s regulatory initiatives to make Victorian households much less reliant on gas by phasing out gas water heaters and requiring upgrades to the energy efficiency of rental properties that would replace gas heaters with cheaper to run efficient reverse cycle air conditioners. They’ve also indicated that they’ll halt transmission upgrades and severely restrict where wind farms can be built.
This will leave Victorians much more reliant on gas. So where is that gas going to come from and how much will it cost?
According to a recent Liberal-National Party’s policy announcement,
Within 60 days of coming to government, we will launch a statewide Request for Proposal process, inviting gas producers to tell us where Victoria’s best conventional gas opportunities are and how quickly they can responsibly bring them into production.
That sounds suspiciously like they don’t know. People have been exploring for oil and gas in Victoria for a very long time. An energy policy built on a foundation stone of hope that there is a large, low cost source of conventional gas just waiting to be found that could easily replace Bass Strait? Sure that might be great for Gina Rinehart. But it is bordering on reckless and irresponsible for the Victorian community.
Victoria is in a serious energy pickle. The Victorian Labor Government undoubtedly carries some blame for this, as the geology of Victorian gas supplies have been well known for a long time. So are the physics surrounding 50 year old coal power stations. One Nation has never let science dictate its policy positions, but the Liberal Party should be better than this.
