SMH · Mike Foley · Monday 23 March 2026
Middle East gas shipments to Asia face imminent disruption, giving the Albanese government unexpected leverage over LNG exports to China and Japan — and raising the prospect of price caps or export restrictions on resources Australia never secured for domestic benefit.
Australia discovers it has leverage the way a bloke finds a tenner in last winter's coat — not through planning, but through neglecting to check the pockets for a decade. We've spent twenty years flogging our gas at mates' rates to multinational exporters who pay less tax than a backpacker, and now a Middle Eastern supply shock hands us a bargaining chip we never thought to carve ourselves. Price caps aren't strategy — they're the emergency brake on a car that should've had steering.