"Compensation" Should go to Small Businesses Instead
Friends of the Earth Australia is demanding that the Albanese government stop acting like cowards and rule out any further subsidies to the coal and fossil methane gas sector as a result of price caps.
A recent report, published by academics from Macquarie University and the University of Wollongong, which can be read here and here, said that, while they only employ 17000 people (fossil methane gas) and 37,000 people (coal), these industries have been given $70b in direct subsidies alone between 2015 and 2021.
The report says these foreign-owned companies are getting almost five times more in taxpayer subsidies than they pay in tax themselves.
"Let's look at the facts," Friends of the Earth Offshore Fossil Gas Campaigner Jeff Waters said, "Australians aren't just forking out ridiculous amounts for energy in their homes, they're also handing billions of dollars to these companies out of the budget."
"We are giving these multi-national war profiteering polluters massive handouts while they make runaway profits at the expense of the Australian public," he said, "and now the government is planning to give them even more."
"The thought of us giving them so called compensation for price caps would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious issue. The taxpayer has every right to be incandescent with rage."
"If anyone should be getting so called compensation it should be Australia's biggest employers — small businesses — who are going through a crisis rather than making runaway profits," Jeff Waters said.
He also branded public statements made today by the CEO of the peak body representing the fossil methane gas industry, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association's Samantha McCulloch, as "compete codswallop."
"Saying that the only way to bring energy prices down is to increase supply is as nonsensical as it is pathetic," Jeff Waters said.
"McCulloch complains that the government's actions will allow it to control the energy market, but surely that would be the best outcome for consumers," he said.
