STO Well positioned, page-200

That halfwit Albo and his brainless mate Bowen have really upset our  Japanese friends.

Japan Inc. ruins Labor’s carbon party
Labor is celebrating its safeguard mechanism win, but one of our biggest allies is not happy about Australia’s ‘quiet quitting’ on gas.
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In front of DFAT chief Jan Adams, Resources Minister Madeleine King and Trade Minister Don Farrell, alongside Labor and Coalition MPs as well as a raft of industry groups, the foreign guests unloaded in an unusually blunt style.
Australia is undermining both the global drive to net zero and the global rules based order in its crab-walk away from LNG, which has been slugged by layer upon layer of interventions, taxes and policy changes since Labor took office last May, suggested Ueda, whose $60 billion-plus Ichthys project in Darwin is Japan’s single biggest foreign investment. It delivers 10 per cent of Japan’s gas, and 15 per cent of Korea’s.
“Australia’s ‘quiet quitting’ of the LNG business has potentially very sinister consequences,” said Ueda, whose business has a Perth office that is larger than its Tokyo headquarters. “The question of who will replace Australian supply into the market is front and centre. Alarmingly, the ‘inconvenient truth’ is most likely that Russia, China, and Iran fill the void.”
“I hope this point is obvious to all of you and that you appreciate that this outcome would represent a direct threat to the rules-based international order essential to the peace, stability and prosperity for the region, if not the world”.
Yamagami added that Tokyo’s “neon lights” would go out if Australia ever stopped producing resources exports that account for 70 per cent of Japan’s coal, 60 per cent of its iron ore, and 40 per cent of gas. And while that was only a small taste of Ueda’s speech, which is available on the ambassador’s website, his message left many who heard it stunned. Japanese business leaders rarely like to rock the boat in public, none more so than Inpex.



• Unfortunately, the investment climate in Australia appears to be deteriorating.
• In Japan we say, “Don’t cheat at rock, paper, scissors.”
This translates to “Don’t move the goal posts after the game has started!”