Australians are currently confronting a cost of living crisis that includes soaring energy prices. Ministers have been working for weeks on a strategy to contain the prices of coal and gas, driven up by the fallout from the Ukraine war.

It’s the toughest, most complicated policy issue so far faced by Anthony Albanese, and it’s involved some head-butting with the NSW and Queensland governments.

In this podcast, we talk with Professor Bruce Mountain, Director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University, about this energy policy conundrum, and the attempt to deal with it by price caps.

Mountain says: “One of the great difficulties in capping wholesale coal or gas prices is there’s no guarantee that that will impact the price of electricity. There’s a long chain to be followed between a wholesale cap on coal or gas and the price that the customer pays.”