After months of uncertainty, petrol prices at the bowser are now back to pre-Middle East war levels. It might be difficult to recall the scale of panic generated by rising fuel prices just those short few months ago. There was wall-to-wall media coverage and daily press briefings by politicians exclusively dedicated to our fossil fuel dependency. Politicians were constantly reassuring us that our supply would continue. The underlying message was difficult to miss: Australia will come to a standstill without fossil fuels.
Although those were extreme times, there is nothing new in this media fixation on fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry and its public relations enablers have long prioritised their commercial interests over rapid decarbonisation. They have decades of experience in deploying a sophisticated toolkit that positions their product as essential to economic prosperity and national well-being.
As a result, we’ve bought into the myth that fossil fuels are a necessary part of our lives. Australians still dramatically overestimate what the industry contributes to employment and government revenue. The industry’s manipulation of our attention has ensured that we care deeply about what matters to them—their profit margins and our continued dependency—while completely blinding us to what matters to us: our children’s health, clean air and a liveable climate.
The Price of Social Licence
Journey to just about any regional Australian town and you’ll get a ring-side seat to this manipulation. Back when I lived in Karratha, the mining companies were a constant source of largesse. They supported local sports groups, provided supplies for our community garden, sponsored the local shows, and hosted lavish Christmas parties for their workers. They sold it as a way to boost community spirit: a heart-warming investment in the idea that if the company prospers, the community prospers as well.
There’s no doubt this money is beneficial. But no amount of cash-splashing could ever paper over its core purpose: the raw purchase of social licence. While the industry doles out money with one hand to cement its influence in towns across the country, it uses the other to strangle decarbonisation, abandon communities when projects fold, and charge us multiples of the going rate for our own gas.
The community grants are used and valued, but they also leave local groups in dependency, scrambling for new funds every year. Meanwhile, the effects of the industry’s products are piped straight into our homes, our businesses and our children’s lungs; where the damage will remain for decades, if not centuries.
These days I live in Brisbane. We live in a gentrifying neighbourhood where 1970s houses are replaced by ‘McMansions’, vast, domineering edifices coupling double-storied front doors with tiny post-stamp backyards. As builders erected the latest one, for a young family with two small toddlers, I was surprised to see gas bottles being hooked up. What a strange choice: chaining your home to gas seems bizarre in a state with one of the highest rooftop solar uptakes in the country. I couldn’t see anything but inconvenience and cost to recommend it.
And that’s not even considering the impact on their children.
Australians now have two decades of research showing the health impacts of burning gas in close proximity to children. As far back as 2007, unflued gas heaters were linked to increased asthma symptoms and other respiratory conditions in children. Testing in NSW public schools in 2009 showed that one-third of classrooms exceeded WHO indoor air quality guidelines due to the fumes from these heaters. A wealth of more recent research exploring gas cooking in the home shows it can cause up to 12% of the burden of childhood asthma in Australia, and a 32% increased risk of having current or lifetime asthma.
This health risk is comparable to living with a parent who smokes. So why are we still allowing this product to be piped into our homes?
Because my neighbours probably didn’t know those facts. And that ignorance didn’t arrive by accident.
The fossil fuel industry has been remarkably successful at diverting our attention away from harms to us, and towards harms to them. Just look at their successful multi-million dollar advertising blitz that killed the proposed export profits tax.
This is the playbook: deny, delay, divert. Earlier this year, as fuel prices increased and public anger grew, the fossil fuel industry and its political allies responded with a single, unified call: More subsidies and total protection from any tax that might claw back their profits. They made this argument under the guise of helping out hard-working Australians at the bowser. There was no concession that our dependence on their product put us here in the first place. No acknowledgement that it is this engineered dependency which leaves households exposed to every global price shock. No contrition that if we had decarbonised faster, we’d be released from the shackles of their dirty product. Instead, the message was to supply more fossil fuels, to drill for them more deeply, to refine faster, to keep that product flowing through our nation’s veins, with the damage kept carefully offstage. It was, in the most literal sense, gaslighting. And it worked.
The Playbook: From Outback to Kitchen
The fossil fuel industry has used a deliberate strategy to maintain this dominance, replicated wholesale from the tobacco industry’s success in delaying action on smoking. Intimidating critics, corrupting research, and lobbying against regulation are all in the toolkit. But one tool above all has been particularly powerful for the industry. Their ability to control the story.
To understand how effective this tool is, we can look back to see how it was road-tested in communities living closest to coal seam gas (CSG) wells.
Families began raising health alarms very quickly after CSG operations expanded through Queensland in the early 2010s. There was a sharp increase in hospital admissions for severe circulatory, respiratory and cardiopulmonary conditions, evidence of exposure to toxic chemicals such as lead and cadmium, higher than expected reports of symptoms such as headache, nose bleeding and coughs across all community cohorts, and an up to 467% increase in reported immune and blood diseases in children living in these unconventional gas areas.
By 2013, the government stepped in, releasing the Queensland Health report on health complaints in the Tara region. NSW (2014), the Northern Territory (2014) and Western Australia (2015) followed with their own reviews and inquiries into unconventional gas.
It could have been a moment of action. Gas expansion could have been paused to fully investigate harms before they accelerated. But that was not to be. The Qld Health report, which found ‘no clear evidence’ between reported symptoms and coal seam gas emissions, was criticised as ‘cursory’ and described as ‘comprehensively discredited’. The 2014 NSW review was accused of ignoring public health organisations while allowing substantial industry representation.
Academics also tried to raise the alarm. When Professor Marion Carey and colleagues published a letter in the Medical Journal of Australia documenting multiple instances of air and water contamination linked to unconventional gas development, Australian Energy Producers (formerly Australia Petroleum Production and Exploration Association) had a ready response. They quickly attacked the letter, describing it as a ‘shameful scare campaign’. They doubled down the following year by claiming that the letter compromised the journal’s scientific credibility and contained ‘more political overtones than science’.
The industry also maintained its grip on the narrative by funding research bodies that presented as independent. The Australian Institute of Petroleum’s 30-year HealthWatch study examining petroleum workers’ health (run by Monash University, itself criticised for its willingness to take money from the fossil fuel industry) was cited repeatedly by industry groups to argue that petroleum workers were healthier than the general population. In tandem, Australia’s primary body researching gas industry impacts, the Gas Industry Social and Environment Research Alliance (GISERA), was funded and overseen by the industry itself.
Meanwhile, independent research into gas and community health effectively stalled. Calls from the Australian Medical Association in 2013 to ‘turn CSG off’ were seemingly ignored.
The gaslighting successfully cleared the way for the march of wells across the country, with over 12,000 coal seam gas wells drilled in Queensland since 2010 alone. The research that could have revealed health harms was strangled before it could even begin. By 2025, very few studies into the human health impacts of CSG extraction in Australia had been undertaken. And it paid off in years of skyrocketing profits.
So when the impacts of gas piped into our homes came under scrutiny, the industry was ready.
The Cone of Silence
A blanket of silence seemed to descend on the topic of health harms associated with gas. I searched nearly 49,000 archived pages from 33 of Australia’s gas companies and industry bodies, reaching back to 1996, and could not find a single producer that acknowledged the health harms of burning gas in the home. The closest any industry body came was a 2005 GAMAA fact sheet that conceded unflued gas heaters could ‘affect some people with certain allergies’, while reassuring readers the emissions were ‘very low’. The only company I could find that told households the plain truth was the one selling the alternative: a pro-renewable-energy electricity retailer urging households to swap their gas stoves for induction.
For two decades, Australian media seemed to barely cover the health harms of gas in the home either. I found 1,612 articles mentioning gas and health, some dating back to the 1990s. But once I stripped out everything that was really about gas exports, the wholesale market and industrial operations, only 200 were genuinely about the gas in our homes. Before 2021, there were just 47. Of those, only 27 made the link to poor health. The rest were not arguing gas was good for us; they simply said nothing about health at all. Coverage really only started picking up in 2023, which produced more relevant articles than all of 2007 to 2020 combined. However, even then most reporting fixed on cost and emissions rather than health.
The Community Responds
The increase in media attention may have been triggered by a growing number of grassroots and health-led campaigns. In March 2023, the Climate Council launched ‘I Quit Gas’, fronted by Sarah Wilson of ‘I Quit Sugar’ fame, urging households to switch from gas to all-electric and calling on governments to fund the change. Its own polling captured the problem precisely: While almost everyone knew that breathing in asbestos (92%) and smoking tobacco (90%) was extremely hazardous to health, only 32% of respondents saw burning gas in the home for cooking or heating as harmful. Around the same time, attention turned to one of the industry’s most visible platforms. After viewers spotted that MasterChef Australia was being sponsored by Australian Gas Networks to spruik ‘renewable gas’, Environment Victoria and Doctors for the Environment Australia ran a petition, signed by more than 2,500 people, calling on the show to drop the deal.
Others took the message to the communities where gas cooking is culturally entrenched. Asian Australians for Climate Solutions, the country’s only Asian-led environmental organisation, ran a ‘Getting off Gas Stoves’ campaign showing families that induction can deliver the high heat and ‘wok hei’ long thought to need a gas flame, while sparing the household the cost and the health risk. The industry’s messaging on renewable gas did not go unchallenged either. After complaints from the climate communications group Comms Declare, the advertising watchdog Ad Standards found gas companies’ green claims in breach of the industry’s own Environmental Claims Code, ruling they were not substantiated or verifiable. The consumer regulator went further: in 2025 the ACCC took Australian Gas Networks to the Federal Court over its ‘Love Gas’ campaign, alleging it misled millions of households by claiming the gas in its pipes would be renewable within a generation.
While campaigners worked to shift the culture, it was local government that began to shift the rules. In the absence of meaningful action from the states or the Commonwealth, NSW councils stepped into the gap. Canterbury-Bankstown moved first, banning gas from greenfield sites back in 2021, and from December 2022 Parramatta and Waverley went further, changing their planning controls to require new homes to be all-electric. Others soon followed, among them the City of Sydney, Ryde and Canada Bay, in what has become a community-led wave of council electrification across Sydney and beyond.
Two jurisdictions went further still and turned off new gas connections altogether. The ACT became the first in the country to do so, passing its law in June 2023. Victoria followed, requiring all new homes to be fully electric from 1 January 2024.
But since then, the momentum has largely stalled. In the two years since Victoria acted, no other state or territory has followed. In August 2025, when the Greens moved a motion calling on the NSW Government to ban new gas connections, Labor and the Coalition united to vote it down, 33 to 6. Queensland and Western Australia appear to have made no moves to restrict domestic gas, and beyond an all-electric requirement for new developments passed by the City of Sydney, due to take effect in 2026, the momentum to get gas out of our homes appears to have died.
Meanwhile, around 5 million Australian homes remain connected to the gas network. Roughly 80 per cent of households in Victoria, 75% in Western Australia, and 42% of households in NSW are connected to a gas pipeline.
The industry that once funded our regional sports grounds and community gardens is still, quietly, setting the terms of the national conversation.
Reclaiming what Matters
This iron-tight control of the narrative has delivered measurable, lucrative political results for the industry. Unlike NDIS participants or unhoused Australians, who are told constantly that the budget cannot stretch, the fossil fuel industry never wants for government support. A staggering $16.3 billion in fossil fuel subsidies was gifted by Australian governments in 2025/26 alone, up 9.4% from the previous year. The reduction in fuel standards and the temporary removal of the fuel excise duty were just two more handouts on top of a mountain of existing corporate welfare. This is even while the recent crisis proved lucrative for energy companies’ bottom line, with Woodside announcing a 7% increase in revenue to $US3.26 billion.
The fossil fuel industry has spent decades teaching us where to look. It fixes our gaze on their profits, dressed up as our cost of living, and on a panic at the petrol bowser, while the real cost is paid somewhere much quieter: in our children’s lungs, one kitchen at a time.
The evidence, though, has never been what was missing. The alternatives to gas already exist, and they are cheaper to run, cleaner, and installed in millions of Australian homes. What has been lacking is not information or technology, but a willingness to keep our focus on what truly matters: the health of our children and the air they breathe at home.
Comments
One would suggest it’s a symptom of long-term fossil-fuel interests, aka the US global Atlas (Koch) Network. It also crosses over in the United States with anti-immigrant MAGA (Rockefeller/Exxon) Tanton Network, with local iterations and symptoms.
Desmog recently published an investigation of a global fossil-fuel advertising campaign, in addition to the 24/7/365 fossil-fuel agitprop: for example, anti-clean energy in RW MSM and public narratives, with Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (later developments such as the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has put European Union on steroids for clean energy).
From The Guardian:
‘Revealed: British ad firm’s billion-dollar greenwash of US oil industry
WPP accused of breaching its climate policy after report reveals firm linked to twice as much oil advertising as US rivals
A British advertising conglomerate has helped the oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP spend an estimated $1bn (£740m) on adverts in the US since the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle the climate crisis, a report shows.’