In the vast, sun-cracked expanse of the Australian interior, where the earth holds secrets in its layered veins coal seams and shale beds pulsing with the promise of fire there's a quiet betrayal unfolding. It's not the drought that starves the land this time, nor the bushfires that scar it, but the meddling grasp of governments, state and federal, twisting what should be a bounty into a beggar's plea. We've got gas enough to light the world, buried deep in Queensland's Surat Basin or the Beetaloo's ancient folds, yet here we stand on the east coast, staring down a shortfall that's as needless as it is cruel. Prices climbing like smoke from a dying campfire, factories shuttering their doors, jobs vanishing into the ether.

And the answer, they tell us with straight faces in Canberra and the state capitals, is not to loosen the grip, but to tighten it further. More rules, more caps, more reservations on what the market might freely yield. It's a politics of pressure, alright, where intervention begets intervention, and the cure looks suspiciously like the disease.

Picture it: the Narrabri fields in New South Wales, where the soil whispers of untapped riches. Santos had the vision back in the early days, drilling into the Cooper Basin, piping gas to Adelaide and Sydney like arteries feeding a growing body. Private hands built that rough men with callused palms, engineers plotting lines across maps stained with red dust.

Governments nodded along, facilitating where they could, but always with an eye to control. By the 2000s, the east coast boomed with coal seam gas, feeding LNG plants at Gladstone, exporting to hungry markets abroad. No domestic reservation then, no heavy hand dictating shares. Prices stayed low, industries hummed—aluminium smelters like Tomago, fertiliser plants churning out the stuff that makes crops thrive.

But then came the activists, the green banners waving in the wind, stirring fears of poisoned aquifers and fractured farmlands. Victoria led the charge in 2017, banning fracking outright, etching it into their constitution like a vow never to be broken. New South Wales imposed exclusion zones, moratoria that stretched like shadows over potential wells. Onshore exploration withered drilling rigs idled, investment fled to friendlier shores.

Regulatory tangles, environmental assessments dragging on like a slow-moving storm front, turned projects into mirages. Narrabri got the nod in 2020, but five years on, not a molecule flows. Beetaloo sits stalled, a basin brimming with potential, locked away by edicts from desks in Darwin or Melbourne.

The fallout? A supply crunch looming like thunderheads over the horizon.

The Australian Energy Market Operator warns of gaps from 2027, widening in the southern states by 2028. Reserves-to-production ratios have slumped to seventeen years on the east coast half what they might be without the shackles. Households feel it in their bills, up thirty-four percent in three years; manufacturers, prices tripled since 2015.

Incitec Pivot's Gibson Island plant closed in 2022, one hundred and seventy souls cast adrift. Qenos plastics followed in 2024, Boyer Paper Mill in Tasmania teeters on the brink, choked by import costs and grid woes. We're talking billions lost—three and a half to eight and a half each year from these price spikes—de-industrialising a nation that once prided itself on making things with its own hands.

Contrast that with Western Australia, where a fifteen percent domestic reservation, set in 2006, kept prices half ours, supply steady as the Indian Ocean's swell. No bans there, no hysteria halting the North West Shelf's flow. Yet on the east, when the Ukraine war sent global prices soaring, what did the feds do? Slapped on a twelve-dollar-per-gigajoule cap in 2022, tinkered with export curbs via the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism. Temporary fixes, they said, but each one sends ripples of uncertainty through boardrooms worldwide. Investors baulk why pour billions into a field where rules shift with the political winds? Sovereign risk, they call it, that invisible tax on confidence.

And now, the drumbeat for more. A federal review eyeing a permanent east coast reservation, expanded regulations by 2025. Gas Market Code, Petroleum Resource Rent Tax tweaks hiking the take from industry. It's as if the blokes in suits have forgotten the lesson of the Dampier-to-Perth pipeline—government overreach turning a straightforward build into a budget blowout. Or the 1990s National Competition Policy, which broke monopolies and let competition breathe. Instead, we're chasing symptoms with sledgehammers, proposing to reserve what isn't yet extracted, cap what the market might balance.

There's an irony here that cuts like salt in a wound: Australia, with its endless horizons and subterranean wealth over twenty-nine thousand petajoules in Queensland alone—reduced to importing gas, risking blackouts as legacy fields fade. We need gas to bridge the renewables gap, six and a half gigawatts of new generation by 2050 to firm the wind and sun. Yet policies born of pressure activist lobbies, rural votes, short-term populism have us chasing our tails. Lift the bans, streamline approvals without skimping on safeguards, fast-track Narrabri and Beetaloo.

Foster trading hubs, 'use-it-or-lose-it' licences that reward action over inertia. Let the market work, with government as enabler, not overseer.

In the end, it's the people who pay the smelter workers nursing redundancy notices, the farmers eyeing barren paddocks where wells might have brought jobs and royalties. The land holds no grudges; it's indifferent to our follies. But we, stumbling through this self-made drought, might yet learn: the hand that intervenes too often ends up empty. Less meddling, more freedom that's the spark to reignite the flame.