“Never waste a good crisis.”

This was me on Q A in June 2022, a few weeks after the federal election and amid the war in Ukraine, which was escalating the cost of energy, triggering a conversation about cost of living and how to pay for a faster rollout of household solar and renewables.

“The elephant in the room seems to be – why are we not getting a bigger return on our assets when it comes to the export of gas?”

Four years later, new war, same conversation.

But are our leaders finally getting with the program?

In that exchange, I suggested an “equalisation levy” on windfall profits, tax being the dirty word that it is.

And lo and behold, the government is finally (reportedly) considering it.

“Energy producers should not benefit from high international prices at the expense of domestic customers,” the prime minister’s department wrote in a document obtained by the ABC ahead of the May budget.

Well, duh, says every Australian who has been paying the price for years.

The document also references further reforms to the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT), which was damply tweaked by Labor in the last parliament, yielding a measly $2.4bn over the four-year forward estimates.

A flat 25% tax on export gas, for example, could yield up to $17bn annually.

With inflation once again a........

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