Is this journalism or advertising?

If you read The Australian this week, you'd begin to think Victorians are furious about being denied a gas connection on a new property. A poll of just over 1,000 people, splashed across the paper as "voter backlash," is being used to pressure our new Premier Ben Carroll into scrapping the rule that new homes built from 2027 won't be connected to the aging gas network.

There's a detail buried in plain sight that most voters are able to see pretty quickly though: the Redbridge poll was commissioned by the Australian Pipelines and Gas Association — the gas industry's own lobby group. This isn't independent research. It's a company that sells gas infrastructure asking people if they'd like the option of gas, then presenting the results as public outrage. Is this really what passes as journalism holding power to account these days? Or is it just another industry press release with a Redbridge letterhead, run in a Murdoch rag that has spent years campaigning against climate action.

So let's talk about what's actually happening to gas in Victoria — and why the ban is one of the more sensible things any government has done for household budgets in years.

Victoria has run out of cheap gas

For over 50 years, Victorians cooked and heated their homes on gas mined from the Bass Strait; some of the cheapest, most abundant gas in the world, but this era is now over. The last of Bass Strait's gas fields are depleting fast, and Victoria's own government has plainly admitted that legacy supplies are dwindling and prices are going up. In regards to residential gas Victoria is Australia's largest consuming state, and it's facing dramatic forecast shortfalls before the end of this decade. There is no version of the next twenty years where Victorian gas gets cheaper. There's only a question of how fast it keeps climbing.

Victoria still burns through roughly 60% of all residential gas-use in the country — that’s a lot of homes locked into a fuel with a use-by date than anywhere else in Australia. This is not a strength, it's the single biggest energy liability facing Victorian households.

Gas prices are tied to war zones. Renewables aren't.

Here's the part the gas lobby doesn't want printed next to their dubious polls: east coast gas prices are linked to international LNG export prices, which means what you pay for a hot shower in Preston or Ballarat is becoming increasingly determined by geopolitics half a world away.

The clearest recent example is the war in Iran. When the conflict escalated and disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, it didn't just push up bowser prices, it flowed straight into Australian gas pricing, because our domestic market is bolted onto the same volatile international benchmark that Asian LNG buyers pay. Analysts have been pretty blunt about it: gas reservation policy can only ever insulate a fraction of supply, and any prolonged overseas conflict becomes an uncontrollable cost to Victorian bathrooms, loungerooms and kitchens.

This is the trade-off nobody selling "gas choice" wants to admit. Keep your home plumbed into gas, and you're tied to a market that can easily spike because of a missile strike on a refinery in the Gulf. Petrol has always worked this way; bowser prices rise and fall with events that we have zero control over — gas is no different, and it's dragging Victorian energy bills along with it.

Renewables don't have this problem. Sun and wind don't get shipped through some geographical chokepoint that can easily be blockaded. They're our sovereign energy, generated here, priced here, used here and less exposed to some random conflict on the other side of the world.

So, let’s talk about cost-of-living, shall we? In the most recent quarter, wholesale electricity prices in Victoria fell by 60% as renewable generation hit record highs across the grid — the sharpest drop of any state in the country. This is not a modelled forecast, it’s what's already happening to the cost of electrons as wind, solar and batteries do more of the heavy lifting, and gas generation continues to be pushed out.

Two fuels, two trajectories: gas trending up, tied to overseas conflict and shrinking Bass Strait supply; renewables trending down, generated right here, regardless of any overseas tyrant’s next whim.

Gas connections are already shrinking — the market's ahead of the politics

This isn't a fight about whether the gas transition is going to happen, it's happening right now. Victoria's own gas network planning shows system-wide consumption is forecast to keep falling year on year, production out of Gippsland is projected to drop more than a third by the end of the decade, and the pipeline network that once justified itself by scale is now maintaining infrastructure for a shrinking customer base. Every household that electrifies leaves the remaining gas customers picking up more of the fixed network costs — a spiral the industry itself is worried about.

Meanwhile, electrification is accelerating for the simplest of reasons: running a heat pump costs less than running a gas heater, every single year, and that gap is only growing as gas gets more expensive and electricity gets cheaper. Households aren't choosing electricity because of an ideological preference, they’re actually just switched on and just doing the math.

Every home needs electricity, none of them need gas.

It's worth stating the obvious, because the framing of "choice" in this debate tends to skip past it: every single home in Victoria needs an electricity connection. None of them need a gas connection. Gas has always been a second, optional, more expensive network layered on top of the one everybody already has to have. Removing the requirement to build that second network into new homes isn't taking away a right; it's just stopping the state from mandating a permanent, unnecessary cost paid by people who might never once decide it was worth it.

And here's the asymmetry the ‘energy choice’ argument always manages to leave out: you can put solar panels on your own roof and generate free electricity for the life of the system. You cannot put a gas well in your backyard. One of these energy sources can be owned, generated and controlled by the household. The other can only ever be bought from a handful of companies, at a price set by a global market you have no say in. This is called energy democracy, and the fossil fuel companies can’t stand it!

Burning gas in your kitchen is a cost-of-dying issue

There's also a health cost to this "choice" that rarely makes it into the coverage. Cooking with gas releases nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde directly into the air you and your kids breathe. Australian research has found that roughly 12% of childhood asthma nationally is attributable to gas stove use, and international cohort studies put children in gas-cooking households at around 40% higher risk of asthma. This isn't some fringe opinion — it's been replicated across multiple studies over more than a decade, and it disproportionately affects kids in homes without good ventilation, which tends to mean renters and lower-income households least able to do anything about it.

A policy that steers new homes away from gas is also, significantly, a meaningful public health measure.

So, who's actually running this campaign?

Go back to that poll. It was commissioned by the Australian Pipelines and Gas Association — a body that exists to represent the commercial interests of gas pipeline and distribution companies. Its chief executive is quoted in the coverage insisting this "isn't a city-versus-country or a young-versus-old issue," which is exactly the kind of universalising language you'd expect from an industry group trying to make a niche commercial interest sound like a grassroots consensus.

It's not a coincidence that this poll landed in The Australian, a paper with a long editorial history of scepticism toward climate policy and the energy transition, days after a change of premier created an opening to pressure the incoming government before it settles on a position. That's not a scandal;  it's just how lobbying works. But it means the story you read wasn't really about what Victorians think. It was about what a gas industry body wants Ben Carroll to think Victorians think.

Victorians deserve an energy debate based on where prices, supply and health outcomes are actually heading; not one overtly promoted by a dying industry with the most to lose from this 21st century transition succeeding.

The Energy Justice Collective is a project of Friends of the Earth Melbourne working for a fast, fair, and community-led transition away from fossil fuels. Find out more about our work.