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

In the deep south of my electorate, in the southern forests around Manjimup and Pemberton, our potato farmers are working flat out at the moment. The Della-Vedovas, the Bendottis, the Omodeis, the De Campos and many, many other families are busy harvesting potatoes, which are on a very finely tuned supply chain. They start harvesting in January and they generally go through until about June. Those potatoes end up on the shelves in our major supermarkets within days of them coming out of the ground.

Now, yesterday I asked a question of the minister on behalf of one of those farmers, Dom Della-Vedova, who had been told that he had 10 days fuel supply and that it would be three weeks before he would get any more. I asked the minister if he could guarantee that Dom will get the fuel that he needs. The minister obfuscated for three minutes. He gave some very vague assurances that there was enough fuel in Australia, but he couldn't give the guarantee that those potato farmers in the south of my electorate in WA will get the fuel that they need.

Now, we heard today that the Kwinana storage tanks have had a block put on them and that distributors are not allowing fuel to leave those tanks. The minister says in the Dad's Army style of Corporal Jones, 'Don't panic, don't panic.' But these farmers aren't panicking. They're just being prudent and they are being told that the fuel that they need to get those potatoes out of the ground and get them onto the supermarket shelves is not going to be available. That's not panicking; that's responding to something that you've been told by your supplier.

Going more broadly than my potato farmers, Western Australia just produced 27.2 million tonnes of grain in the last harvest. Those farmers have just come off a record season and are busy preparing for the next season. There's a lot going on out on the broadacre wheat belt farms that requires a lot of diesel: they're spreading lime; doing summer spraying; there's stubble rolling going on; and, by the end of the month, they will start dry sowing. If they're not able to start sowing at the correct time, it will have a catastrophic impact on the yield come the end of the year.

When they ring up their fuel suppliers and say they need 25,000 or 50,000 litres, which is a big dump—that's the two tankers you see on the road, in one hit—and they are told that the fuel is not available, they're not panicking but are concerned about that, and they want answers from the minister. The minister says we've got plenty of fuel on hand here and there are ships on the water; it's all good. But anybody looking a bit beyond that, like a farmer who might need fuel at end of March into April and through May for their seeding program would be thinking that the conflict in the Middle East has been going for about eight or nine days now, which is about the shipping time either from the Middle East or a little bit less out of Singapore, where a lot of our fuel is refined, but a lot of that crude does come out of the Middle East. Twenty per cent of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and we haven't yet seen the impact of the fact that that strait has now been closed for nine days.

So, if I'm a wheat belt farmer and I'm thinking I'm going to need a considerable amount of diesel in the next two to three months and we haven't really seen the impact of the conflict on fuel supply yet, then I'd be very concerned. I wouldn't necessarily be panicking, but I would be very concerned. I'd be very concerned that the minister can't give us any assurances and doesn't seem to have taken this issue seriously until the last couple of days. Now he's holding meetings with the various regulatory bodies and so on. It is of enormous concern to the people of my electorate.

Going beyond our farmers, we're seeing roadhouses across the electorate running out of fuel. We've seen prices spike. I've seen up to $2.27 for unleaded 91 across my electorate. Flicking through the responses to my Facebook post from yesterday's question, I saw someone had posted a historical post from the Prime Minister in 2021 where he'd posted a fuel station sign showing petrol at $1.79. He said, 'I bet Scott Morrison hasn't been out looking at petrol prices recently.' Well, isn't karma beautiful? At the moment we are seeing petrol prices under this Prime Minister rocket through $2.20, and we'll see them hit $2.50 if they don't get the Strait of Hormuz cleared shortly.

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