A former Liberal premier says Anthony Albanese's election as Prime Minister likely heralds a "decade of Labor" in power, saying his old party is in a "desperate situation" at a federal and state level.
Colin Barnett, WA premier between 2008 and 2017, said the Liberal Party needed to modernise itself by recruiting a new generation of future leaders.
Mr Barnett made the comments in an interview with the ABC in which he called for the construction of a cross-continental gas pipeline and for the eastern states to adopt a domestic gas reservation policy which had helped WA avoid crippling prices that were threatening industry and the manufacturing sector.
"The Liberal Party is in a desperate situation," Mr Barnett told Afternoon Briefing.
"And I think Australia's is looking at a scenario of probably a decade of Labor, and in Western Australia the same, so this is a bad time for the Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party lost five of its 10 WA seats in the May 21 federal election after suffering a 10.4 per cent swing to Labor, which picked up four extra seats: Hasluck, Pearce, Swan and Tangney.
The blue-ribbon seat of Curtin was lost to teal independent Kate Cheney.
In the March 2021 state election, the Liberal Party was reduced to just two out of 59 seats in the legislative assembly, in an extraordinary 17.7 per cent landslide swing to Mark McGowan's Labor government.
'The gas belongs to Australia'
In WA, both the Labor and Liberal parties support a policy of gas reservation under which 15 per cent of gas produced must be set aside for the domestic market.
No other state or territory has such a policy.
This has meant that while wholesale gas is between $5.50 and $6.50 a gigajoule in WA, it is $40 a gigajoule in the eastern states after the regulator slapped producers with a price cap.
About 90 per cent of Australia's gas reserves are off WA's north-western coast, with most of the big gas fields in Commonwealth waters.
"So Western Australia has a long-term reliable supply of gas because of the existence of the gas here, and also because of the reservation policy," Mr Barnett said.
But the former premier said the gas market had operated ineptly in the rest of Australia.
"Put simply, the gas belongs to Australia," Mr Barnett said.
"The policy about giving gas and energy security to the major cities of Australia, south-east Australia, really have been very inept for the last 15 years. There hasn't been long-term planning.
"At the moment, gas prices are high because there's a shortage of gas in Australia, but one medium to long-term solution is simply to increase the supply of gas, and I would suggest use gas from the west coast and also develop some gas resources on the east coast.
"It needs a long-term solution. But for the next few years, there'll have to be some short-term measures taken and that might be restricting or reserving some of that gas for the domestic market.
"The companies aren't going to like that because their profit, their big earnings, come from exports. About four times the amount of gas used in Australia is exported as LNG."
Mr Barnett said Australia should commission a gas pipeline between WA and South Australia's Moomba gas fields to bolster domestic supply.
"We need to do what other countries around the world have done and that is build a trans-Australian gas pipeline," he told the ABC.
"It would be a big project and expensive project, but it is one that would pay for itself and could be done quite easily by private enterprise. Most continents around the world have trans-continental pipelines the Americas, Europe and so on."
He estimated such a pipeline would cost about $6 billion but said Mr Albanese could embrace it as a "big nation-building project" funded by Australian superannuation funds.
"There are no mountain ranges in the way, no real barriers, and a pipeline would go from the north-west coast of Western Australia, across the Nullarbor and into the Moomba gas field area in South Australia and then distributed more widely through the east coast through existing pipelines."
He said that in his time as premier, a 1,500km, 132-inch pipeline between the Pilbara to Kalgoorlie was built in 10 months.
"So if a decision was made today to go down the path of the trans-Australian pipeline, it would take three years — the major delay would be simply procuring the steel pipe," he said.
"And Australia, being such a major producer of international gas, really should be doing it for its own people.
"After all, it's Australia's gas."
