Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying prior to the interruption for members' statements at 1.30, the fuel security service payment is one of two key components of this legislation. The fuel security service payment will be a payment to the refiners to limit the downside risk. This payment will cease when the refining margin reaches $10.20 per barrel. It will increase to 1.8 cents per litre when the margin per barrel is as low as $7.30. That is the cap. It will not increase beyond that measure. For the refiners to be able to access this payment and this support they will have to agree to continue to refine fuel in Australia until the middle of 2027. That is the incentive, I guess, for the remaining refineries to continue to produce fuel here in Australia. That is a particularly important part of this package.

The second part of the package, one that's particularly important to my electorate and me, is the minimum stockholding obligation. This is an obligation for industry to retain levels of petrol, diesel and jet fuel to increase by up to 40 per cent by 2024. The reason this was brought to my attention was that, when we were in the middle of the COVID lockdown in April last year, we were preparing for seeding in the electorate of O'Connor, which is a vast agricultural electorate. We were faced with a situation where we had closures and shutdowns happening all over the place, farmers were preparing to sow their crops and no-one really knew whether trucks would be allowed to get through. We didn't know whether fuel supplies were going to be shipped to his country. It caused incredible angst amongst my communities, particularly the agriculture communities but also the mining communities.

As the season unfolded and the crop went in we were able to get access to the supplies that were needed for those farmers and those croppers, but it was much broader than that. The woodchip industry requires large amounts of fuel. Just getting general freight from the city to Albany and Esperance and other parts of my electorate is 700 kays. To Kalgoorlie it's 600 kilometres. Just to sustain these communities with food and general supplies requires an enormous amount of fuel, particularly diesoline in this case. We got through that, but it did bring home to my communities just how important was having a guaranteed supply or a much larger stockholding of fuel.

To illustrate the importance of getting that crop in, last year the Western Australian grain crop, which was sown in that April-May period, produced around $6 billion worth of grain, which was mostly exported. That was the sowing of the crop component and the producing of the crop. Once the crop is harvested, we have to get that crop to port. Once again, that requires large amounts of diesel, whether that be for road transport—around two million tonnes of that crop is transported by road—or for locomotives.

It's not just the grain industry that was exposed. Western Australia last year produced something like 228 tonnes of gold. Australia is the second-largest producer of gold in the world, and of course that gold last year brought in many billions of dollars of export income that was, once again, critical to the recovery of our economy, and we're seeing that ongoing recovery at the moment. So the importance of having the strategic fuel reserves was brought home in no uncertain fashion last year.

The towns of Albany and Esperance already have significant storage facilities which are not being fully utilised by the various fuel supply companies. As part of this program I'm looking forward to seeing some investment by those fuel companies in the upgrading of those facilities and in the bringing on of refurbishment to make sure that those fuel supplies are stored in the regions where they are required, in the region that produces the wealth of this state, and are available for our primary producers across my electorate of O'Connor and Western Australia and Australia more broadly.

That's all that I wanted to say on this bill in my short contribution. I just wanted to draw the parliament's attention to (a) how important it is to have these strategic stocks of fuel stored around my electorate and (b) the incredible contribution that primary producers—be they farmers or foresters—the tourism industry and the mining sector make to not only the economy of Western Australia but the economy of Australia more broadly.

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