ASX Runners of the Week: Alvo, Pioneer Minerals & Dalaroo

ASX investors and newcomers remained in limbo this week as the AI-boom continues to look increasingly at odds with a much more sinister underlying reality. Wall Street’s S&P 500 is still flirting with record highs, but the rally is becoming increasingly narrow. In August, around 70 per cent of S&P 500 companies traded above their 50-day moving average. By early October, that figure had slumped to roughly 28 per cent, with a handful of AI heavyweights doing much of the heavy lifting. Beneath the headline highs, the market is looking increasingly fragile, leaving investors wondering which breaks first — stocks or bonds?

Closer to home, Albo and Minister for - expensive - Energy Chris Bowen headed to Fiji for a pre-COP climate summit holiday of grandiose proportions. Carrying an estimated $20 million price tag, Bowen’s summit attracted precisely zero international enthusiasm for its grandstanding, with even the leader of our closest ally, New Zealand, not bothering to show up and Albo the only G20 leader in attendance.

While global leaders abandon net zero grandstanding, Labor appears to have missed the memo. After taking aim in last week’s Runners at Australia’s Net Zero virtue signalling and its convenient approach to keeping coal out of sight and out of mind, we were almost tempted to think the NSW Labor Government had found a way to outdo itself. Enter the High Court’s ruling on the Hunter Valley’s Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion, adding another layer of legal uncertainty to an industry that remains one of Australia’s most important economic lifelines.

The court ruled that NSW planning authorities had failed to properly consider the emissions generated when coal from the Mount Pleasant mine expansion was burned overseas. So, if we can’t have affordable energy, then nobody can? The decision does not automatically ban new coal mines, but it sets a precedent that could turn future approvals into a legal minefield and send investors running for the hills.

And that is precisely the problem. Australia is already making life difficult for our last industry in which it holds a genuine global competitive advantage, despite its enormous contribution to export earnings, investment, regional jobs and government royalties.

The stupidity of the policy direction becomes difficult to ignore. What exactly happens when Australia makes it harder to supply a commodity the rest of the world still wants? Does India abandon efforts to improve living conditions for its 1.5 billion citizens? Does China suddenly stop making steel because NSW thinks it should consider emissions produced thousands of kilometres away?

Of course not. The demand doesn’t disappear because Australia makes its own projects harder to approve. Buyers instead turn to Indonesia and other suppliers at a premium, while Australia’s economy wilts away.

After killing the affordability of energy for our manufacturing industry, we are now putting up more legal obstacles in front of our coal industry while competing nations happily supply the very same markets - nailed it.

Mining investment runs on confidence that big, long-term projects can get the green light.