Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

We're hearing the word now, aren't we? We're hearing the word 'crisis'. It took a little while before they started saying 'crisis', but by gosh we're hearing it a lot now. And we're hearing the word 'urgency'. It took a little bit of time before they started saying the word 'urgency', but we're hearing the word a lot now. And of course what we're seeing is that they're rushing forward a bill. Do you know why they rush bills forward? It's because they're panicking, because they're not across the situation.

I'll show you how much they're not across the situation. When I first brought this up three weeks ago on Sunrise, they said, 'Don't worry, because we have electric trucks'—electric trucks, electric prime movers. I was gobsmacked. Then I asked the minister, 'How many days supply of diesel do we have?' And he was almost incredulous: 'Nothing to worry about here!' Within a week: big problems. Right now, this is how bad it's got. I have funeral directors contacting me. They don't have the fuel to pick up family members who have died and cart them back so they can, in a dignified way, be kept in a condition that's appropriate before they're buried. And the government says this is not a crisis.

I'll tell you where we're going to have a big crisis. We now have tractors that are unable to produce the food you need. They are basically sitting in a paddock because we can't get the supply of diesel. At the start, it was just like the fuel crisis: 'It won't matter, because there's stuff in storage.' But, as it starts to filter through and we can't get it to the marketplace—like we can't load cattle—you're going to start running out of food. We have got to have a plan. That's why I say that we must start rationing now. People aren't going to like it. People are going to be very upset by it. But it's better to show the people that you've got a plan, that you've worked out how much diesel is required and how much fuel is required, and that you'll work your way down through the most essential parts of your economy so they get the product first.

If things sort themselves out in the Middle East, we can just wait until the fuel's running again and we can just go back to the way we were. We've been fascinated—well, I haven't. But this place has been fascinated by such rubbish as green hydrogen, solar panels, wind towers and climate change. This issue should have been seen. I tell you why. It's because one of the issues that we should be planning for, unfortunately—President Xi says he's going to take Taiwan by 2027. It's 2026. That will also shut down all your supply lines. They'll all get shut down. We should have had that plan. We should have had that worked out because the situation in a smaller form is what's happening now. If we had that worked out, we'd be able to better handle this one.

Even now, there is no sense of really grasping this situation for exactly what it is before it's in its more, to be quite frank, worrying form: it doesn't start arriving at the supermarkets. If it's arriving with funeral directors, if funeral directors in country areas are contacting me because they can't get access to fuel, I think that should ring a bell about how trucks are going to go in carting product around. I can assure you that, every time they say there's more fuel, my phone rings hot. They say that there's more fuel in Australia. Well, why haven't we got it? Why isn't it in regional areas? What have you done wrong? Have you got it hidden? Who has got this fuel? The mythical fuel company? It's just there. It's out in the ether. We just can't get it to the stores. We can't get it to the fuel stations.

If you have bulk uses of fuel like trucks do, 1,800 litres in a B-double—if they don't get it delivered to them in bulk so they can use it at their depot, they go to the fuel stations. When they go to the fuel stations, the towns run out of fuel. This has not been managed. This has been a fiasco, and I might say that it was first brought to the attention of this chamber by One Nation without a shadow of a doubt. We were talking about ISIS brides, we were talking about fuel, and now everybody's playing catch-up. You better start coming up with rationing. You better start coming up with alternative paths for fuel to come in here, because, if you can't work that out, we're going to have problems getting food to supermarkets.

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