In new homes, they can be fitted with heat pump water heaters, or electric resistance. Heat pumps are fairly efficient, but need the house to be designed with that in mind. Electric is less so, but can use very small spaces and be retrofited as well.

It would be interesting seeing what happens in NSW, given that their gas network has always been in private hands, with very little government involvement.

Gas hot water heaters tend to be a lot more efficient than gas cooktops. The flat bottom of most pots and pans means a lot of heat will escape up the sides, but hot water heaters can be designed with this in mind. On pots, I have one that basically has heatsink fins on the bottom to better capture the gas heat, but this is far from typical.

Local here. You don't need a gas connection if your house is all electric. A lot of new houses are all electric already, some bigger builders already do all electric.

Some houses have fireplaces both gas or actual fireplaces. I have a gas fireplace but I don't use it as I have solar and electric heating so it's much cheaper than running the gas heater.

Question for locals: do you need gas connections?

Opinions on this are going to differ a lot.
I really like cooking on gas, but acknowledge it wastes a useful resource, is environmentally bad and potentially harmful to my families health.

Side question: do you have fireplaces, gas or otherwise?

It's becoming less common.
My last house, we had an internal combustion (wood) heater as the primary form of heating.
I know several people who have gas powered whole house ducted heating.
Both of these things are becoming prohibitively expensive to run compared to decent reverse cycle (heat pump) split systems.

Like everything, there's more layers than an onion to this.
Older houses had decent insulation as heating and cooling were hard.
Houses built from the 70s on have shit insulation, as running a heater or cooler year round were cheap and easy.

Back in the 00s, the federal government tried to kill 2 bids with one stone here - stimulate the economy whilst improving the insulation of most houses through what became known as the "Pink Bats" program
This itself become massively controversial as the program was rorted to hell, and even some deaths, leading to a royal commision.

The whole "ban new installs of gas" is a bit of a Green initiative, but it's becoming more common across the country, starting with Australian Capital Territory, which banned it in June.

I'm curious about this as well. The climate there can easily support efficient electric heat sources (heat pump) in the cold season. Gas ranges/hobs are nice but induction is pretty good now.

I wish I didn't have to rely on gas for heating. I just got a $600 bill for 2 months of ducted heating.

House is a rental, and the air con has no reverse cycle. The ducted heating also recently broke, and being a rental it was just changed over, as the landlord doesn't need to worry about operating costs at all.

I'm in NZ, not Australia, but...

Gas connections are somewhat common, but by no means essential.

As most houses in Aus have Aircon and heading requirements are minimal, fitting reverse cycle (heat pump) units is easy, cheap, and efficient.

Most houses don't use gas for cooking. Using electric/induction is easy.

Water heating is the only real 'killer app' gas has, because most houses don't have the power for electric continuous flow. People will have to spare a little bit more space for a tank.

Depends what you mean by need. I have gas but just for cooking. Otherwise there's just air-conditioning. Definitely more moderate winters than Canada though.

It's also worth noting Victoria has limited amount of gas and is expected to run into shortages due to the limited pipeline capacity and LPG terminals

Natural gas is pretty common to have in homes in Victoria.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/australias-victoria-state-looks-wean-households-off-gas-2022-07-02/#:~:text=The%20state%2C%20where%2080%25%20of,to%20use%20hydrogen%20and%20biomethane.

We sell it to other country's for less than what we sell it to ourselves, also sorry about the submarines.

For refereance:

https://youtu.be/xqegTsi6SiE

Yeah, but its more valuable as an export than it is domestically.

Australia loves green initiatives locally but REALLY loves our trillion dollar coal and gas export industry.

It's produced in Australia and mostly exported. Only Western Australia was smart enough to make sure they set some domestic production aside for domestic use instead of being forced to pay global prices. Everyone on the eastern seaboard had to swallow a spike in energy prices across the board when the Ukraine war started.

Shit loads of it, along with coal its a massive earner for export.

Our two major political parties have so much coal and gas money pumping into them that anything that may reduce the profitability doesn't get far.

We don't have gas at home but I think it's stupidly expensive as a local consumer too.

depending on how often you do it you could buy a little butane stove from bunnings. We changed to induction and i'm in love with it, even tho i thought I would hate it. But yeah, I use the little camp stove for stirfrys and charring vegetables.

It's just new builds, they're not forcing people to get rid of their existing connections. It should be easy to phase in, and hopefully batteries and the like come down in price.

Who?

Because burning it (mostly methane) creates/releases greenhouse emissions such as CO2 and N2O.