LIVE

Wed 9 Apr

Australia Institute Live: Day 12 of the 2025 election campaign. As it happened.

Amy Remeikis – Chief Political Analyst

This blog is now closed.

Key posts

The Day's News

14.50 AEST

I mean, if there is one positive to take from the Trump tariffs, it is that Gina Rinehart’s companies are suffering too.

AAP have done a markets wrap:

Nearly $50 billion has been erased from Australia’s top-500 public companies as US tariffs take effect and US-China trade war tensions escalate.

The S&P/ASX200 had fallen by 133.9 points, or 1.78 per cent, to 7,373.8 by 2:10pm AEST on Wednesday as the broader All Ordinaries lost 142.8 points, or 1.84 per cent, to 7,562.6.

The sell-off has erased almost three-quarters of Tuesday’s 2.3 per cent relief rally, leaving the key S&P/ASX200 down more than 14 per cent from mid-February’s 8,615 all-time high.

Roughly $49 billion had been wiped from the All Ordinaries’ 2.6 trillion market cap on Wednesday alone, as hopes of easing trade war tensions came to nothing, and ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs took effect at 2pm AEST, including a 104 per cent impost on Chinese exports to the US.

“We are on the verge of seeing the two largest economic and military superpowers collide at high speed, with Australia caught squarely in the middle,” IG Markets analyst Tony Sycamore said.

“If current lines hold, the fallout has the potential to dwarf the economic impact on the Australian economy felt during the GFC and COVID.”

The sell-off came after another volatile Wall Street session that finished in the red with the White House confirming the tariffs, and forging ahead with the counter-retaliatory measures against China.

China has vowed to “fight to the end” the US-led trade war.

The S&P500 benchmark index has lost $US5.8 trillion ($A9.8 trillion) from its combined market cap since the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were announced on April 2.

All 11 local sectors were in the red by the afternoon, with energy stocks, materials and health care stocks all shedding more than 3.4 per cent.

14.45 AEST

Are the Trump tariffs as dumb as they seem? (They’re even worse)

Richard Denniss and Emma Shortis discuss Trump’s plan to tank the world economy:

14.34 AEST

Jacqui Lambie has been quite busy lately – the Tasmanian senator has also appeared on Abbie Chatfield’s podcast, ‘It’s a lot’ where she spoke about her political journey so far, and her mistakes early on – including that she looks back at some of her clips when she was pushing conservative lines and wonders what the hell she was doing.

She has been steadfast against what the salmon industry is doing in Tasmania for some time, and she discusses that in this interview:

Senator Jacqui Lambie tells ABC Statewide Mornings the salmon industry lost her support when the companies were bought out by multinationals. "They don't care, they can't care about clean, green Tasmania," Senator Lambie says. #auspol

— The Australia Institute (@australiainstitute.org.au) 2025-04-09T03:58:31.882Z

14.26 AEST

Labor Friends of Palestine push for Albanese government to act against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza

Labor Friends Of Palestine NSW have issued their federal election statement, calling on a re-elected Labor government to “unconditionally” condemn Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and settler violence in the West Bank, end military cooperation with Israel and act in accordance with humanitarian law (These groups are party members who have come together in sub groups to try and get the party to change positions – in this case, the response to Gaza)

14.21 AEST

This conspiracy theory wasn’t helped by the fact the News Corp panelists discussing the debate once it finished were completely miffed by the questions the audience asked.
Almost as if the hosts were….out of touch?

14.17 AEST

Let’s take a bit of a look at how the campaigns looked today, thanks to AAP:

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese serves ice cream while attending the official opening of Hay St Market
Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton visits BlueScope steel facility in Erskine Park
ICE CREAM
Dutton hears the call of the ice cream

14.12 AEST

Matt Grudnoff
Senior Economist

The Greens plans to crack down on negative gearing and the CGT discount is a policy that will have a real impact on making housing more affordable.

It is the rapid increase in investor demand that is driving up house prices, not the lack of supply of housing. Building more housing will make housing more affordable but real progress can only be made if we tackle to root cause, too many investors flooding the market, bidding up house prices.

Not only will reforming these two massive tax concessions help make housing more affordable, but it will also raise billions of dollars that can be further used to build more public housing.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/

14.09 AEST

The Dutton gas reservation policy explained; the simple way

Matt Saunders
Senior Economist

The Dutton policy works by creating a strong incentive for some gas to first be sold locally rather than exported.

It first does this by setting a benchmark price of $10/GJ. It chose this price because it is a nice round number and because it will allow everyone to still make profits. In comparison, the current domestic wholesale price of gas is around $14/GJ. And you can export gas as LNG for a bit more than $14/GJ, but it costs money to turn it into LNG and ship it overseas, so the exporter still receives around $14/GJ.

The aim of the incentive is to reduce domestic wholesale gas prices down to $10G. The ‘incentive’ is a Gas Security Charge on some, nor all, exports of LNG from Queensland. A Gas Security Charge is a fancy name for a term economists like to call a ‘tax on exports’. The tax on exports does not apply to all exports, but only those exports that are not ‘locked-into’ existing long-term LNG contracts. Gas exported in addition to the existing long-term contracts are known as ‘spot-trades’.

The tax is set at a little over $4/GJ on these ‘spot-trades’. Let’s say $4.10/GJ. That means that if a gas producer decides to export gas as an LNG ‘spot-trade’ they will now receive only $9.90/GJ ($14/GJ – $4.10/GJ tax). But they can instead sell at any price to the domestic market. Initially still at $14/GJ. As more gas is pumped locally the domestic wholesale price should start to fall. In theory, the domestic price should keep falling until it reaches the $10/GJ, the benchmark price, as produces find it more profitable to sell locally rather than exporting.

 The upshot is that the Gas Security Charge should generate zero revenue. It is an incentive not to export. If gas producers find enough gas to get the wholesale price down to $10/GJ, they are free to re-start LNG spot-trades without the ‘burden’ of the Gas Security Charge. So there remains a built-in incentive for ever more gas because… Coalition. Meanwhile, other parts of Dutton’s gas policy are wacko like:

  1. Making gas a critical mineral (Hint: Gas is a gas not a mineral)
  2. Including gas generation in the Capacity Investment Scheme (an existing policy designed to increase renewable electricity not fossil fuel gas generation).

The benefits to households of the lower gas prices are modest, household gas prices are expected to fall 7% and electricity prices down 3% (gas prices strongly influence electricity prices). Which could be about $96 saving per average household per year. Industrial uses of gas, particularly some manufacturing, will get bigger falls in their gas prices and that may have additional positive benefits across the economy.

But while on the topic of export taxes on gas, sorry Gas Security Charges, a plain-Jane vanilla export tax of just $2/GJ on all of Australia’s LNG exports could raise close to $9 billion a year.

13.59 AEST

Speaking of Chris Bowen, he had a few lines he liked today:

Also today, I note that the Liberal Party has released their scam-phlet, which is their alleged modelling of their gas policy. I mean, I’ve seen longer menus in a restaurant than this, and there’s 135 words in here about the impact on electricity prices. James Paterson told the Australian people that they’ve been working on this for a year, which works out at a very low productivity per word, if this is a year’s work. This is a nonsense document filled with holes, and I’ll be having more to say to that tomorrow at the debate.

13.58 AEST

The debate between Jim Chalmers and Angus Taylor is being held this evening (again on Sky) and Greg Jericho and I will be going double or nothing in subjecting ourselves to Sky After Dark, so you don’t have to. Sky business editor Ross Greenwood will host that one.

And then we have the energy debate between Chris Bowen and Ted O’Brien tomorrow afternoon – this one is at the national press club and will be at lunch time, so no need to break into your schedule there either. We will have you covered.

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