The comment about gas being more expensive than electricity seems a bit disingenuous. I was under the impression that Australia has plenty of natural gas reserves, and gas would be cheap if it weren't for failure of government to manage it properly.
A huge part of the cost of gas is the connection fees and network maintenance. I had a place that only had gas for the stove and I was paying more for the daily connection fee than the actual usage.
It also costs a load to fit out in new builds which is a cost that eventually gets placed on the occupants.
It was commercially viable to deploy residential gas infra in the past (when electricity was a lot cheaper than now!) and yet gas isnt viable now. It doesn't stack up. I don't pretend to know much about the economics of residential gas supply, but I wonder if your high connection charge was a result of costs being spread across fewer customers (driven away by high usage costs).
Reserves in eastern Australia are tapping out and reserves in Western Australia are too far away from any city other than maybe Perth (but most of the reserves seem to be in northern Western Australia closer to Darwin). It is more profitable for them to liquify the gas in Darwin and ship it to Japan and China than to build pipes to eastern Australia. In fact, it looks like they are building a liquified NG terminal in southern Australia to get it by boat from northwestern Australia (competing with Japan and china for the same supply).
