Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, exactly. They are living it every single day. Every single day we see farmers sleeping alongside their machinery to protect the fuel they need to plant or harvest their crops. That's what's happening. We see fuel being siphoned from vehicles so that Australians in suburbs around our country can have the fuel that they need to make ends meet. Truck drivers are cutting back on deliveries because they simply can't afford the fuel. They can't rely on the supply, because it has become unreliable.

Yet, in the face of all this, we have seen Labor ministers standing up and telling Australians that it's all okay, that it's all tickety-boo, that there's not a problem here and that Australians shouldn't believe what they're seeing. It's all misinformation. It's all fake news. They have said that supply is stronger than ever, that stocks are higher than ever, that there is no crisis and that we're not there yet. But Australians are there. When they fill up their cars and they look at the price they pay or they look at those tickets saying there's nothing in the bowser, they know what's going on.

There are small businesses across this country that are being forced to choose between passing on their costs to customers or struggling to lay off workers. We heard about Mary earlier on; we heard about Godden Food earlier on as well. We got some kind of completely unintelligible answer on Godden Food. It certainly didn't mention the challenges that Godden Food was facing.

Before any of this happened, Australia's economy and Australians were under strain. There have been two interest rate increases. More are expected. Inflation is surging, and Australians are struggling to make ends meet within an economy that is not working for them. I will lay out a couple of facts that I think are quite striking. The Treasurer likes to crow about how, under his time as Treasurer, the economy has grown in aggregate by 7½ per cent, and he thinks that's terribly impressive. What he forgets to say is that the population of Australia has grown by—wait for it—7½ per cent. It's exactly the same number. We know that nearly all of that is immigration. This is an economy that does not deliver to Australians.

It gets worse, though, because, even to achieve that flat outcome—GDP per person hasn't moved and hasn't gone up—Australians have had to work more hours per person, 4½ per cent. They're working harder for less in an economy with raging inflation, rising interest rates, government spending growing faster than anything in the economy, and non-market services and all the things that government funds growing faster than the private sector, which has been crowded out by a government that thinks a government directed economy is the answer to everything. It's not, and, in that context—when Australians are working harder for less and when they're going backwards—we are hit with a fuel crisis that this government has completely failed to acknowledge and certainly failed to take action on and fix.

Labor's response to this has been absolutely shocking. When the Prime Minister was in opposition, he said that leadership was all about taking responsibility. He said it many, many times. He said, 'Australia needed a government that would accept responsibility and tell it straight.' He said as Prime Minister that the buck would stop with him. They were his words. But, now in office and faced with a fuel crisis, it's all changed. They took days and days before they could accept there was a national crisis, and, well before that, it was all completely fine.

What Australians really want from this government and from this prime minister is leadership. That's what they want. They want leadership. The Premier of Queensland—who shows leadership all the time—David Crisafulli has said; 'All we're after is a national plan. It is a national crisis, and it does need action.' New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has said that the response to the crisis 'needs to be done on a national level'. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has said, 'Action should be coordinated at the national level.' These premiers aren't on our side of politics, but they know who needs to take responsibility. Even the Prime Minister himself has accepted that national coordination is essential. It's just that he's forgotten to do it.

We're all taught from a young age that we're going to meet adversity in our lives. Tough things happen—tough things happen in our country; tough things happen in our lives—but what matters is how we respond to it. Clearly our parents didn't have this prime minister or this government in mind when they said it, because you can contrast this government's inaction with what we did to secure our fuel supplies in this country. The two actions that this minister, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, is most fond of reciting were done by us when we were in government. We guaranteed the future of our refineries in Geelong and at Lytton. I stood up with the head of the AWU and announced the refinery guarantee up at Lytton in Queensland. I stood to celebrate with the Deputy Prime Minister in Geelong to secure the future of those refineries which have been the only good news in achieving in what's been done over the last couple of weeks. The extraordinary thing is this energy minister forced one of those refineries to export all their petrol. He forced them with his emissions obsession to export their petrol. It took him weeks before he worked this out and actually finally changed the rules when he came under pressure. The other initiative that he loves to talk about is the extra storages that have been built and the Mandatory Stockholding Obligation put in place by us. We invested $200 million to build an extra 780 megalitres of diesel storage, which have obviously contributed to higher stock holdings than we otherwise would have had.

Australians are right to ask why this government has responded so pathetically to what we've seen, but we know. They are obsessed with net zero. We know that they don't want to see coal, gas and fuel in this country into the future. They haven't approved projects. They've made it harder for those industries to survive and sustain our energy system in this country. They've funded activists to engage in lawfare; the EDO is out there stopping these projects week by week, undermining our fuel security in this country.

They've put in place the safeguard mechanism, with high penalties and high taxes. Effectively, this is a carbon tax on industry in this country. It's a carbon tax on our manufacturers, on our aluminium smelters and on our fuel refineries. I tell you what, when we get into government, it's going—that carbon tax that they have snuck in and are imposing on all Australians, along with their vehicle emissions tax, another carbon tax. We know they're looking at farmers; they're going to go after them. There's their Capacity Investment Scheme that's working as a carbon tax in the electricity system. This government has undermined our energy security and our fuel security since they came into government.

This prime minister has failed to take leadership. Every Australian is paying a price for that. The government needs to take responsibility and fix the problem in front of it and become a responsible government for this great country.

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