Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

I'm glad to speak on the government's Fuel Security Bill 2021 and, particularly, to support the second reading amendment moved by the shadow minister, the member for McMahon. There is no doubt that fuel security is a critical issue. In fact, it's what I would describe as a serious security issue. We do have from time to time in public debate, in the parliament and from the government a lot of noise about security issues that are, frankly, much lower down the totem pole when it comes to meaningful security than is fuel security. It's a shame that we don't focus on areas like this more often. If we've learnt anything in the last year and a half, it is that areas like energy self-sufficiency, energy resilience, health resilience and climate resilience are really the kinds of serious risks to our economic, social and health wellbeing that we need to think about a lot more than we do. The beating of the drums in some other areas is disproportionate to the risks that something like fuel security presents to us.

Most Australians would have little sense of the fragile position that we are in when it comes to fuel security. It's easy enough to give some examples of the circumstances that we're dealing with. The bottom line is that, in the data from 2019, consumption cover in Australia was equivalent to only 18 days of petrol, 22 days of diesel and 23 days of jet fuel. So it's somewhere between two and three weeks of coverage. At the moment, people go to the supermarket and the shelves are stocked, and they go to the petrol station and they fill up their cars, or, if they're fortunate enough to be able to travel from one part of Australia to another, they go to the airport, without really thinking that, if there were to be an interruption to our fuel supply, all of that would grind to a terrible halt in very, very short time. It would affect everything. The economic and social impacts of that would be hard to anticipate. And the risks of that occurring are not small. We are an island nation. We are a significant fuel importer. We are predominantly reliant on fuel imports. If there were to be some interruption of supply because of events in the Middle East or the South China Sea, we would find ourselves running out of fuel very, very quickly. And fuel is essential to everything.

The risk of that kind of black swan event is not high, but the impacts of such an event are massive. The fact that we have done nothing to really address that vulnerability and that fragility is hard to understand. We fell out of compliance with the IEA in 2012. After the oil shocks that occurred in the 1970s, sensible countries joined together and said: 'Let's avoid that happening. Let's make some shared commitments to liquid fuel resilience, the easiest measure of which is 90 days of coverage.' Australia fell out of compliance in 2012, and we now have somewhere around 55 or 56 days out of the 90 days we should have. There are no other countries that are currently not compliant. In that period of time between 2012 and now, a couple of nations have fallen out of compliance by a few days, for a few days. I think Luxembourg is one of them, literally going from 90 days to 88 days, for a week or something. We've been mired down in the 50s for a long time, and we've not improved that position. To the extent that we've gone from the low 50s to the mid-50s, it's because the government has settled arrangements with other countries to spend millions of dollars purchasing oil tickets, which essentially mean that we can make a call on oil reserves in other countries. That's not really to deal with an oil crisis or a liquid fuel crisis in this country; that would just release supply into the market that would, in a sense, meet our obligations under the IEA. But nothing significant has occurred to address that problem.

Even though these bills put in place some measures that are helpful, they come very late. It wasn't that long ago that Australia had seven oil refineries. It wasn't that long ago—literally 18 months ago—that we had four refineries. We now have two refineries. So the government has decided to come along and apply $2 billion—$2,000 million—of taxpayers' funds to underwrite the last two refineries. Unfortunately the largest refinery in Western Australia has gone under. It's salient, as we have this debate at the national level, to remember that, unlike most other countries, Australia is a continental landmass with capital cities—with the six states and two territories—distributed across a huge area. We might talk about 55 days of liquid fuel coverage for the nation as a whole, but it would be interesting to see what that breakdown is state by state. If there comes a crisis, what happens in Western Australia or in other more distributed parts of the country that have a liquid fuel crisis? They're going to need to get liquid fuel from other parts of Australia. How are they going to get that? The only way to really move it is by ship. Australia doesn't have a single fuel tanker.

Think of all the kinds of security that we should be focused on in this country and the way that they've been either allowed to deteriorate, or, in the case of shipping, run down because the coalition in its current guise and the government before that, the Howard government, have an ideological dislike of maritime workers and Australian shipping because of its working foundation, which is the Maritime Union of Australia and the labour movement. As a result, we've now got about 10 flagged ships and we don't have a fuel tanker. So we're a continental landmass and an island nation that's entirely reliant on fuel being shipped here. If there were a crisis that put that in jeopardy, we don't even have the vessel that could transport the fuel to this nation.

We've seen through COVID the government do deals that were contractual arrangements in relation to vaccines. A lot of confidence was put in those arrangements. But, when there was a need for vaccines that we supposedly had a contractual call on from Europe, did they actually turn up here? No, they didn't, because those countries held onto the vaccine. I tell you what, if there was an international oil crisis, do you think other countries would be in a big hurry to send liquid fuel here? Would they be in a hurry to free up their own merchant marine to transport scarce fuel to Australia? You can imagine how that conversation would go. So this government has known for some time about the scale of the problem.

We are extraordinarily vulnerable in Australia. There is no other country that's in the same kind of parlous situation that we are in. We are an island nation. We now have only two refineries, and the problem with that is that refined fuel has a shorter shelf life, so our ability to bring in crude, hold it and refine it as we need is now decreased. We have the third highest per capita ownership of personal motor vehicles in the world. We have done an abysmal job, an appalling job, of moving towards electric vehicles, which the rest of the world is doing. We have one-seventh of the uptake by car-loving countries like Canada and the United States.

Our mining and agricultural sectors are 90 per cent reliant on diesel fuel. If you think about the Australian economy, you will hear from those opposite about how we are dependent upon and we benefit from mining, resources and agriculture, which is undoubtedly true, but they are 90 per cent reliant on diesel fuel. We have about three weeks of diesel cover. If there were a fuel shock that prevented diesel coming to Australia, can you imagine what would happen to those industries? Our transport is 99 per cent reliant on liquid fuels, partly because we've made virtually zero progress in terms of the energy resilience that you get by moving towards the electrification of transport. And all those other countries aren't doing that for fun. They're not doing that because it's a woke manoeuvre or whatever it would be criticised as being by those opposite. They're doing it because it's smart—because it improves their security.

One of the leaders of energy self-sufficiency in the United States is US Defense. Why are they doing that? It's because they know how risky it is to be reliant on liquid fuels. So, within Defense, in the various parts of marine, army and navy, part of their budget goes to new energy innovation because they want defence, as well as every other critical part of their nation's operations, to be free from the vulnerability that comes with massive reliance on liquid fuels.

But what's Australia doing? We have campaigns from those opposite. When we talk about making a modest change towards greater electrification, those opposite decide to run a scare campaign about people not having their utes anymore. It is just ridiculous. It makes us incredibly vulnerable to future shocks and to black swan events in a way that no other country on Earth is. If it happens, I'll be really fascinated to see how those opposite reflect on what they haven't done in the eight years that they've been in government.

Our defence department does have an energy related strategy. I think it's called the Defence Estate Energy Strategy. The last one ran from 2015 to 2019. We don't have another one. That strategy—look it up; get the PDF—is not a very impressive piece of work, because it doesn't have many commitments to using defence as a way of pioneering energy innovation. But it existed and at least identified a couple of things. It covered the period 2015 to 2019. As someone who has an interest in liquid fuel security, I've been looking for the next version of that, presumably the 2020 to 2024 version. It doesn't exist.

The US Navy has a project that's looking to make the Navy shift towards things like hydrogen. We actually piggyback off that, so we have been a participant in that US-led project. I think the Australian Army has put a little bit of money into some off-grid sort of energy sources that it could use in certain circumstances; that's about the scale of it—virtually nothing in transport. Why is that? Why is the US doing it and we're not? It's because it's too woke. Imagine if Defence, God forbid, was looking at energy resilience. That would be too woke. Defence would have gone green. We would probably get the minister up here, telling them that in addition to having certain morning teas, they have to abandon any efforts to make Australia's security in a better, more appropriate 21st century shape by investing in energy resilience, self-sufficiency and a shift away from liquid fuels.

What the government is doing now is very little and very late. The interim report of the Liquid Fuel Security Review was issued in May 2019. It received some further submissions and it closed. As I understand, it was provided to the minister towards the end of that year. We still haven't seen that. It follows the pattern of this government that it doesn't want to listen, it doesn't want to focus on the real issues but it wants to play political games and it wants to spend $55 million updating Christmas Island. It wants to spend six or seven million dollars keeping one Sri Lankan family on Christmas Island. These are the security issues, right? 'Our security is at risk, Australia. We have a Sri Lankan family that we need to spend more than $60 million keeping incarcerated until their younger daughter is gravely ill. That's how we will be strong and secure in this country. That's what we will do; that's brilliant!' Meanwhile, we've been out of compliance with our IEA obligation for eight years.

We are the most liquid-fuel-vulnerable nation on earth and this government has done nothing—nothing—about it. What finally prompts them? It's a bit like the sort of fuel security equivalent of that poor little girl. We go from four refineries to two refineries and: 'Oh, we better do something. What will we do? We will spend $2 billion from the taxpayer purse to keep those other remaining commercial refineries going!'

Investment in electrification, investment in storage, Australian shipping, doing something about Australian shipping, making sure we have, as an island continent, the ability to get things to and from here—don't worry about that. Beat the drums of war, talk about China, lock up young families until they're almost dead—that's how we will deal with security under this government. (Time expired)

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