Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

roundtables, summits. 'Anyone for a forum? Anyone for another meeting? How about we have a phone hook-up? Let's see if we can make a decision to improve the lives of Australians!'

The Albanese Labor government is asleep at the wheel and out of gas—unnecessarily so. As we have seen all too well this week, the Albanese Labor government has been gaslighting Australians and blaming the Australian public, particularly farmers, for buying fuel—fuel they need because unseasonably wet conditions mean that crops need to go in or weeds need to be sprayed. Once again, we see the government blaming the victims of this crisis when they should be taking responsibility, gaslighting Australians that there was no such supply crisis—even at the beginning of last week there was no supply crisis, apparently—and then being dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledging, actually, there is a crisis.

Australia has immense reserves of oil and gas—and, I might say, coal and uranium. Geoscience Australia estimates that we have over 100,000 petajoules in proven and probable resources. That's around 17 billion barrels. The US Energy Information Administration estimated 13 years ago that we have a further 403 billion barrels of shale oil, with around 17½ billion barrels deemed recoverable at that stage. Theoretically, based on a daily oil consumption of over one million barrels a day, we could use our recoverable shale oil for around 42 years. That's just a starting point.

Australia also has an incredible capacity to produce biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, but stocks on hand at present are not being brought into the mix. Take, for example, biodiesel. Australia produced 2.14 million tonnes of canola in 2019 and more in recent years, and we could have used that to produce 5.5 million barrels of biodiesel. Instead, 70 per cent of that canola, or carinata, went to the European Union for them to make into biodiesel.

This is a crisis that was entirely foreseeable. The late former senator Jim Molan was saying as much—that our fuel security was at risk and we needed domestic, sovereign capacity.

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