Extract from The Guardian
Despite government money and hype about the power of gas to fire up the economy, the only thing that’s on the rise is exports.
The Australia Institute notes that ‘for every person who works in gas there are 56 people who work in the heath sector’.
Last modified on Tue 25 May 2021 03.31 AEST
For all the good news about the recovery from the nadir of last year, as a new report makes clear, despite the big talk from the Morrison government, it was not a gas-led recovery.
The Australia Institute’s “Too Little Too Late” report looks at evidence of a gas led-recovery and concluded that “the gas industry effectively made no contribution to the economic recovery, so far”.
Even worse, it notes that “if the rest of the Australian economy had performed as poorly as the gas sector, the recovery would be yet to begin”.
From May last year to the latest quarterly data in February, jobs in the direct gas sectors of mining and supply fell 11.6% and 9.1%.
That, the report’s authors, Matt Saunders and Richard Denniss, note is among the worst falls in any sector, and well behind the strong recovery of the hospitality and retail sectors.
Fortunately, these huge percentage falls don’t actually account for many job losses – just over 2,300 in oil and gas mining and less than 1,500 in gas supply:
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Because here’s the thing about the gas industry – it employs very few people.
Over the past five years with the opening up of the LNG export market, gas mining has taken off – now adding as much value to the economy as iron ore mining:
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But it hasn’t led to a boom in jobs. Even within the notoriously small employing mining industry the gas sector lags well below iron ore:
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Well … alas no.
As Adam Morton reported last week, the environmental impact statement for the Kurri Kurri gas plant estimated it would employ “250 construction jobs and about 10 positions during operation”.
The Australia Institute notes that “for every person who works in gas there are 56 people who work in the heath sector”.
There are as many people who work in “heritage activities” of museums and parks than in the total gas sector:
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Andrew Liveris, the former Dow Chemical chairman and chief executive, who was engaged as a special adviser to the now defunct National Covid-19 Coordinating Commission on manufacturing, told ABC’s Q&A last month that “there’s 850,000 Australians employed by industries that use gas as a feedstock”.
Scott Morrison has used this line as well. He told the national press club last October that “gas is the transition fuel … importantly, as a feed stock, and through no less an adviser than Andrew Liveris, who knows a bit about this, he made it pretty clear – if you don’t fix gas, you can’t fix manufacturing”.
It’s a pretty bold claim given that 850,000 is the entire number of people employed in the manufacturing industry and Liveris was just talking about “fertilisers, plastics, chemicals, explosives …”
It was a claim that had Liveris’ fellow Q&A panellist Malcolm Turnbull concluding with dry understatement “I don’t think that’s true.”
The Australia Institute report agrees with Turnbull.
Its analysis shows that the gas feedstock manufacturing sectors of basic chemicals, polymers, fertilisers and pesticides, and other basic chemical products employs only about 14,000 workers.
That is less than 2% of the total manufacturing industry and a mere 0.1% of all employed in Australia:
The Australia Institute also estimates that more gas is used at LNG terminals than is used as feedstock.
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When you hear members of the government suggest we need more gas for our domestic industry and residential use, always remember our domestic consumption of gas is not expected to increase at all – all the new extraction is about feeding the LNG export market:
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This is hardly surprising, when you realise that Shell, which is behind the Gorgon gas project, does not believe it will ever pay the Australian government a cent in resource taxes.
Yes, there has been a big boom of gas extraction recently, but not in the past year, and the few jobs in the sector have also fallen.
What has not fallen is the recent government assistance to the sector:
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All that money to an industry that produces few jobs but lots of greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the International Energy Agency has argued there must be no more new gas, oil or coal development if we are to get to net zero emissions by 2050.
It’s almost as if the Morrison government doesn’t care about emissions … or for that matter, jobs.
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