Dutton has questions to answer on gas; Albanese has supermarket answer still hunting for the problem

Peter Dutton is a tease when it comes to the fine print of policies. At least that’s the benign explanation. Critics have a harsher take on why we’re always being told to wait for the detail. They would claim his policies are often thin, or unfolded on the run.

Right now, we’re into the first week of the campaign, with polls published^[1] on Sunday turning in Labor’s direction, and we’re still waiting for more on the Coalition’s gas reservation policy, announced in Dutton’s budget reply, as well as precision on its immigration policy and for how much extra it would spend on defence.

Dutton said on Sunday we’d get information on the gas policy in the next “couple of days”.

Danny Price, of Frontier Economics, has been hard at work, putting some modelling together. Price did the modelling for the opposition’s controversial nuclear policy, finding it much cheaper than the government’s energy transition plan. But those numbers depend on the assumptions. That modelling was contested, and no doubt so will be the gas policy analysis.

Whatever the numbers that come out, they won’t include one key figure: what you would (arguably) save on your power bill. The opposition has learned something from Labor’s debacle of promising, before the last election, that its energy policy would save households $275 by 2025.

At the weekend Albanese dismissed Labor’s modelling before the 2022 election as “RepuTex modelling based on the circumstances at the time”. Indeed.

Dutton has, however, suggested his gas policy would reduce the wholesale domestic price from $14 per gigajoule to under $10 a gigajoule. More gas would mean cheaper prices, is its logic.

The opposition’s thinking is that it lands the generality of a policy first, lets the public absorb that, and then produces detail. But the trouble with releasing the detail so late is the Coalition is likely to get bogged down in a confusing and damaging debate over what opponents will say are dodgy numbers and assumptions.

This can lose a day or more and there aren’t that many days in a five-week campaign, especially when pre-polling starts a fortnight before the end.

While Dutton was batting off questions about gas at the weekend, Anthony Albanese swung into his campaign stride in a comfort zone – at attack on supermarkets.

He announced that if re-elected, Labor will legislate against supermarkets being able to price gouge. Not immediately though. There’d be a taskforce to work out the detail.

There’s more than a touch of chutzpah here. We’ve just seen the report of a long inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission into supermarkets. It found they were very profitable but it didn’t find price gouging. Its raft of recommendations did not include legislation on price gouging.

This hasn’t deterred the PM, who provided his own definition of the problem. “I got asked today by someone … ‘how do you know what price gouging is?’ Price gouging is when supermarkets are taking the piss off Australian consumers. That’s what it is. That’s what price gouging is. Everyone out there knows. Consumers know. We’ll take action here.”

He did give the rather less colloquial EU definition.“In the EU, a price is unfair and excessive if, and to quote their law, ‘it has no reasonable relation to the economic value of the product supplied’.”

After a fairly ordinary start to the campaign, this week Donald Trump will step right into the centre of it, with his much-anticipated tariff announcement. Australian officials continue to lobby the US; no one is confidently predicting whether or not we’ll be escape the firing line.

Before the Trump announcement will come Tuesday’s first meeting of the new monetary policy board that has been set up under Labor’s changes to the Reserve Bank.

Unlike February, when all the heat was on the bank’s governor to deliver that rate cut (which did come), nobody is expecting another cut yet. Michele Bullock can relax this week.

References

1. ^{^} with polls published (www.theaustralian.com.au)