An open letter to the Senate: Pass the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill – in the national interest

News | 15 November 2026

To all Senators of the Australian Parliament,

We write as organisations that rarely speak with one voice: unions, manufacturers, energy users and businesses, representing hundreds of thousands of Australian workers and their families.

On this issue we are united.

We urge the Senate to pass the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026, preserving its key design elements, before it rises for the year.

We support a reservation scheme that delivers on the objectives of securing domestic gas supply and reducing domestic gas prices.

Australia is one of the world’s largest gas exporters, yet it has no national mechanism to ensure its own people and industries are supplied first.

Western Australia has reserved gas for domestic customers since 2006, benefiting its households and industry.

On the East Coast, risks of gas shortages are common, and prices have become tied to volatile and high-priced global markets, with the cost borne by manufacturers, workers, households and small businesses.

Reliable, competitively priced gas underpins hundreds of thousands of jobs, many in regional Australia.

It firms an electricity grid with growing renewables, and it flows directly into the cost of living pressures on Australian households.

Gas Reservation has been recommended for more than a decade by voices from across the political spectrum. Each government has taken incremental steps towards addressing the problem.

This is not any one party’s reform. It is reform in the national interest.

We recognise that Senators hold differing views on aspects of the reservation design.

The scheme can and should be refined through development of supporting regulations and through periodic review.

But with reservation due to start on 1 January 2028, industry and households need certainty now. Delay is not a neutral outcome.

We ask every Senator to put the national interest first and pass this Bill.

Yours sincerely,

Marghanita Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Aluminium Council

Melissa Donnelly, Secretary, Australian Council of Trade Unions

Innes Willox, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Industry Group

Steve Murphy, National Secretary, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union

Paul Farrow, National Secretary, Australian Workers Union

Matthew Flugge, Chief Executive Officer, Chemistry Australia

Andrew Richards, Chief Executive Officer, Energy Users Association of Australia

Ben Eade, Chief Executive Officer, Manufacturing Australia

Please click here to view and download this letter