Southeast Asia haze: Indonesia steps up firefighting efforts at Way Kambas National Park in Sumatra

When a minister paid at the top tier of global compensation acts surprised that a sovereign neighbor pulled a legal trump card, it treats Singaporeans like we have zero commercial literacy.
<br>Every standard long-term gas supply contract held by GSPL and Sembcorp through 2028 is written with explicit &quot;Change in Law&quot; and &quot;Government Directive&quot; clauses. When Indonesia’s upstream regulator enforces Article 8 of their Oil and Gas Law to prioritize domestic grids, the supplier isn&#39;t breaching the contract—they are operating under an excused, legal curtailment built directly into the fine print. Pretending that our commercial entities can just &quot;pursue recourse&quot; through arbitration against a sovereign emergency mandate is either empty posturing or a refusal to read the contracts sitting on their own desks.
<br>Waving around the &quot;less than 2 per cent of total demand&quot; stat is economic gaslighting. Power grids don&#39;t price electricity on averages; they price on the marginal unit. Knocking out cheap baseload piped gas forces generation units onto volatile spot LNG or emergency diesel during a strained global market, and that price shock gets blasted straight into business operating costs and household tariffs.
<br>We watched this exact script play out with the historical sand and granite bans. Calling structural resource nationalism a sudden shock—and then telling people to keep calm while passing down the bill—shows a foreign and energy policy that keeps backing us into predictable corners. If the defense against a foreseeable geopolitical squeeze is just telling us the water is fine while the heater maxes out, maybe the accountability for the job needs a reality check too.