Obama's deal was "dumb". US Vice President Mike Pence later confirmed that the United States would honour the deal, subject to "extreme vetting" of asylum seekers. Australia began receiving Central American asylum seekers in July 2017. Energy policy Since the 2016 election, the Turnbull government had followed prior Coalition government energy policies. This involved the wholesale dismissal of renewable energy targets and emissions intensity schemes. This had only hardened when South Australia faced large blackouts, which Turnbull had blamed on the state's "ambitious" renewable energy target. In response to the gas and energy crisis that occurred in March 2017, Malcolm Turnbull announced a 50% increase in the capacity of Snowy Hydro through "pumped hydro" technology. In April 2017, Turnbull announced that he would use the Commonwealth government's powers to place export restrictions on the nation's liquified natural gas ("LNG") industry. He announced that these changes were in response to the high wholesale gas prices that were a result of a shortage of gas in the domestic gas market, and that it was "unacceptable" that domestic prices were so high, indicating that a consequence of these restrictions would be a decrease in the wholesale gas price. The multinational gas companies and the gas industry association heavily criticised the policy, saying that it would neither increase supply nor reduce the wholesale price of gas. Same-sex marriage plebiscite Prior to Turnbull becoming Prime Minister, the parliamentary Liberal Party voted to resolve the issue of same-sex marriage by putting the question to Australians voters via a plebiscite. Enabling legislation was rejected twice by the Senate, and so the government decided to adopt a postal plebiscite option, which involved the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducting a nationwide survey asking voters whether they would like to see a change in the definition of marriage. Sending out of ballots began on 12 September 2017, as attempts to prevent the survey through a High Court challenge failed. The survey ended 7 November 2017 and results released 15 November the same year. It returned with a total of 7,817,247 (61.6%) "Yes" responses and 4,873,987 (38.4%) "No" responses. Following the vote, after four days of debates regarding amendments which included proposals to increase religious protections to refuse services to same-sex couples, on 7 December 2017 same-sex marriage was legalised through a parliamentary vote by the House of Representatives; Turnbull himself voted "Yes". The first same-sex marriages in Australia occurred as