Dutton fires gun on the election

Dutton is too parsimonious on immigration – a drop of only 25% is not enough when we've got the hangover of 1 million net immigrants in the system in just the last couple of years. But at least he's talking about it.

We were barely building enough homes for natural increase, so the overhang of 400,000 or so homes these immigrants need is still sitting there and could take a decade to clear as natural increase will still happen.

The promise to shed 40,000 public servants will wear well with these groups. Afterall, with digitization the admin side of their businesses is actually smaller than it was 20 years ago, so why should the administrative size of the Commonwealth government have grown even faster than the population?

Dutton doubles down on his nuclear promise, as he should. Australia is one of the few developed countries that either doesn't have nuclear energy or doesn't have plans to introduce it.

The future will be made everywhere but Australia if we don't have a nuclear industry. Renewables have their place but they are not reliable enough, nor do they produce the quality electricity, that sophisticated manufacturing needs.

But he makes a mistake in insisting gas exporters must direct 10 to 20 per cent of their output to the domestic market at a price below the international price.

He wants Australia to be a minerals powerhouse, but it can't be if this sort of sovereign risk is introduced. These companies built their businesses on contracts to sell gas overseas and without those contracts the gas would not have been extracted.

Other miners will be deterred from setting up in Australia if they think their investment can be pirated by feckless politicians.

If Dutton wants to do something about the domestic gas price he needs to fix supply. This won't be fixed by speeding-up gas projects in the Beetaloo as he promised. It is too far away and will be too expensive by the time it gets down pipelines to where it is needed.

He needs to lay down the law to Victoria, which has banned onshore gas exploration despite having plenty of gas. Only they can truly fix their own gas supply problem at a preferential price.

He should also be promising to fix the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act which is responsible for holding up minerals, including gas projects, by allowing busy body environmentalists to initiate nuisance legal actions.

Defunding the government-funded Environmental Defenders Office is one thing, but if the legislation was fixed, then privately funded operations would cease to be a problem too.