This time instead of paying an eastern states price we will be paying a global price. Whereas the carbon tax pushed up gas prices 9 per cent (and is being removed) the shift to a world price will push up wholesale prices more than 100 per cent and keep them there.

Within months Gladstone will become the first port to send eastern states gas offshore. Each of its six liquefaction units will bottle as much gas as Victoria uses each year. They are meant to be fuelled from Queensland’s coal seam gas, but in case there’s not enough the owners have arranged to get gas from all sorts of places, including Victoria, using the network of pipes that already exists.

It will push up the eastern states wholesale price from around $4 a gigajoule to $9. Japan is said to be prepared to pay $18. It’ll do it because as soon as it is possible to sell gas overseas, gas producers will be able to demand the same price from local customers that they can get overseas (less the cost of processing and shipping). If their Australian customers don’t pay, they will sell it overseas, for the overseas price.

Each time an existing $4 contract comes up for renewal it’s being replaced with a $9 one (sometimes $11). Contracts typically last years, so they are not all being changed at once, but by 2016-17 the average wholesale price is expected to hit $9.

What are we hearing from our government? On Sunday the ABC’s Background Briefing unearthed a tape of Abbott speaking in Texas in January at an event hosted by Chevron, BHP Billiton and ConocoPhillips: “Australia will soon be the world’s number one exporter of liquefied natural gas,” he boasted. “Australia is the world’s largest exporter of black coal and we are the world’s third largest uranium producer.”