Senate Economics Legislation Committee [Part 2], , 3:27:52 to 3:31:52
ACCC update on gas market reporting, production cost estimates, and the transition of responsibilities to the AER.
Topics: Energy prices, Cost recovery
Speakers: Senator Susan McDonald, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, Speaker 26, Senator Lisa Darmanin, Unknown Speaker, Interjection
kick off again. Um, I uh now welcome representatives from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Um, and I welcome Miss Gina Cascottle, chair of the uh AC. We do have your opening statement here and would very much appreciate if you are happy for us to um table that and we can go straight to questions.
>> Very happy to do so. Thank you chair.
>> Thank you very much. >> Appreciate it. Uh so first off we have Senator McDonald.
>> Thank you. Good evening. Lovely to see >> Uh can I just clarify your responsibilities now with gas market reporting and gas prices reporting? That will all be handled by the AR by what point or can just give me that time frame please.
>> We are currently working together with Treasury DQ and the AR in respect of timing that the government is to make a final decision on. Uh we uh will are continuing to review gas pricing and the ADGSM advising >> uh at this current time. I I believe that the decision should be made and announced fairly soon, but I'm not sure of the exact timing.
>> Okay. Could you uh advise what data uh what what information you have on average cost of production for gas uh in Australia? And I guess if you divide it up roughly what markets would you divide it up into? Could you could we do Victoria, Queensland? How how we we haven't talked about the regions before. I think we've just talked about an east coast.
>> East coast. Yes. Though we have looked at the southern states. Um the >> we had uh both cost of uh production from uh earlier periods. So looking at $9 through to $12. I will check with our head of this team, Angelu, who is right here as to more recent data that we
>> Good evening, Senator. Um, the ACC itself has not produced gas production estimates, but we did commission Rice Dad Energy to produce some estimates for us. They were published in conjunction with our December report last year. Um, that report um provided some uh gas production costs. um based on uh what they called supplier regions and so they identified 21 supplier regions. So um we can provide you the link to the publication. It um it estimated uh production costs based on um uh what they called a uh full life cycle production cost basis which looked at past costs as well as future costs and then a forward-looking basis and the the forward-looking basis costs were based on basins that are fairly mature and that have recovered their sunk costs. So they've got quite a bit of detail on how they calculated the average production cost for those basins.
>> Terrific. So, you'll give me that link on notice.
>> Yes.
>> Um, ideally, if you could give it to me tomorrow because we will have the um the second of our gas reservation inquiry on Friday. So, it would be most helpful. >> Thank you. Uh, could I turn now to uh something quite different which is airline pricing? Uh can I understand what airline price what fairs monitoring the AC is still doing or is doing?