Speaking at the Australian Energy Summit in Sydney, chief executive officer Brad Page reinforced the need for around $30 billion for new infrastructure capital spending in the downstream energy sector over the next 15 years and said that governments held the key to improving investor confidence and assuring energy supply reliability.

Page said that challenges for governments in providing an energy investment-friendly climate included completing governance and regulatory reform programs, and ensuring that regulation and government intervention was limited to situations of market failure.

“There is also a great need to improve the existing infrastructure permitting processes and make greenhouse policy more consistent and coordinated,” said Page.

Page said the ESSA’s policy principles, which he announced at the Summit, are the measures against which government proposals will be tested by the association to further the industry’s aim of achieving an energy investor-friendly climate.

Key principles include:

· the efficient attraction and allocation of capital – human, financial and physical – is positively encouraged by government with distortions and impediments removed;

· governments facilitate the timely maintenance, expansion and development of facilities in the energy sector by demonstrating the availability of resources, by allowing investment to proceed according to market signals and decisions, and by providing improved, efficient and stable approval and permitting processes;

· the energy industry is not subjected to business and competition regulation beyond that applying to the rest of the economy;

· to the extent that industry-specific regulation is justified by market failure, energy market regulation should be through a single national regime that is light-handed, low-cost and delivers high quality regulatory decisions;

· the cost of complying with government requirements in environmental matters must be fully and explicitly reflected in any regulated prices;

· a single greenhouse gas emission policy should apply nationally, and include an emission target for 2050 to be set; and

· government social and equity objeVtives that would not ordinarily be met by competitive market operations should be explicitly described and directly funded by governments.