Coalition must pass gas reservation or admit it has walked away from manufacturing

News | 12 November 2026

MEDIA RELEASE – Manufacturing Australia – 12 November 2026

Manufacturing Australia has called on the Coalition to pass the Domestic Gas Reservation Bills. If it won’t, it should explain to manufacturers, households and small businesses why it is siding with the commercial interests of three small gas producers over the national interest.

This week the Senate Economics Legislation Committee recommended that the Senate pass the bills. Coalition Senators said they “cannot support the legislative package as it currently stands.”

Manufacturing Australia Chief Executive, Ben Eade, said the Coalition now had to choose.

“The Coalition can’t say it backs manufacturing and lower energy bills and then block the only gas reservation scheme before this Parliament,” Mr Eade said.

“Its own criteria say reservation must deliver ‘Australian gas for Australians’ and more investment in supply. This bill does both. The Senate committee found it gives producers and customers the certainty to sign the long-term contracts that underpin new supply, and that uncertainty about the scheme is already holding those contracts back. The Coalition’s own comments in the report quote energy users saying reservation will lower household and business bills. And then it refuses to pass it. That’s untenable.”

“The loudest voices against the scheme now are three domestic gas producers: Senex, Beach and Amplitude. Between them they employ around 850 Australians. They’re entitled to put their case. They are not entitled to hold a structural national economic reform to ransom, especially when their essential claim is an error.

“Their central claim is that the scheme forces a 10 per cent oversupply that will flood the market and squeeze them out. That is wrong. Domestic producers’ sales are subtracted before exporters’ obligations are set. If domestic producers can beat the offers made by exporters, then they will win the business and the obligation on exporters shrinks.

In every other properly functioning market, which the Coalition would be expected to support, we don’t call that ‘squeezing out.’ We call it competition.”

Run Beach’s own example, cited in the Senate inquiry report, through the scheme and the real supply buffer is 4 per cent, not 10 per cent as claimed. That’s a serious error, and can’t go unchallenged.

The modest buffer is essential to reducing domestic gas prices. It is the key feature that separates domestic and international gas markets and insulates Australia from tight global supply. Without the buffer, global LNG prices – currently around $44/GJ – will continue to set Australian domestic prices, devastating Australian manufacturing and skyrocketing electricity prices for all Australians.

“The Government’s own analysis puts the cost to the gas industry of these bills at $134 million over ten years, against revenue of around $600 billion. That’s two cents in every hundred dollars.

Exploration spending is at a ten-year high, global gas demand is booming and no producer – domestic or exporter – is being shut out of export markets. Nothing in this bill limits access to the global market. All it asks is that Australians are supplied first.

“Nearly 900,000 Australians work in manufacturing. Every Coalition senator now has to decide whether they will back them or not.”

Key facts

• Nothing in the bills limits how much gas can be exported.
• The obligation equals forecast domestic demand plus a modest buffer. It shrinks when demand falls or when it is already being met by domestic producers, and it is capped at 20 per cent of exports.
• The Government’s impact analysis puts the cost to the gas industry at $134 million over ten years, against around $600 billion in revenue.
• Oil and gas exploration spending is at a ten-year high, up 76 per cent in the June quarter on a year earlier.
• The scheme is due to begin on 1 January 2028. Delay leaves manufacturers exposed for longer.

Media contact: Ben Eade, 02 6198 3285