Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This morning, the government introduced this emergency legislation aimed at ensuring Australia's continued fuel supply during the ongoing war in the Middle East. I support emergency measures around fuel supply, especially where Australia's reserves sit well below the International Energy Agency's 90-day mandate and are, in fact, amongst the lowest in the OECD.

But reactive emergency legislation can only go so far. This is the second piece of legislation in just the last week that we've seen for the first time on the day that it has been brought forward for debate. The war in Iran is more than a month old. While we're all glad that the government has finally realised that we are—as we were in the pandemic—in a race to secure sovereign access to fuel and other substances, we have to ask why it's taken the government so long to act and why it is acting in such a piecemeal fashion. We know how that ended in COVID.

The Australian people can't afford for our government to lose the race again. We need to know that the government is going to hold a hose and not just line up for a photo at a bowser in a service station. What the Australian people need is not another emergency measure rushed through in a day. They need assurances that we have a long-term plan to ensure Australia's energy sovereignty. It's only through a genuine commitment to the renewable transition that we will become less vulnerable to the next crisis—knowing that there will inevitably be another crisis.

As to this legislation, Export Finance Australia is an agency of government which has a clear mandate. The agency's powers are currently limited to financing eligible export transactions, overseas infrastructure development and supporting the Future Made in Australia agenda by delivering finance under its national economy and net zero functions. This legislation will give the EFA the additional powers to provide loans, guarantees, equity, insurance, derivatives and price support arrangements. Beyond that, it will have powers to buy, sell and stockpile fuels and other goods and to hedge the exposures that follow. That is a significant expansion of its scope at very short notice and with minimal opportunity for this House to scrutinise the legislation.

The government is claiming that this legislation is about derisking the acquisition and delivery of fuel from international markets—in particular, for regional communities—and avoiding the need for more disruptive emergency interventions down the track. But the mechanism for ensuring this additional supply, which was introduced via this legislation just this morning, raises real concerns. Price support arrangements and government backed supply interventions can distort the very prices that they are designed to stabilise. If the EFA is buying, stockpiling or underwriting fuel supply, it signals to the market that the Commonwealth is willing to absorb risk. This will inevitably change supplier behaviour. The outcome at the bowser might paradoxically be even higher prices.

We have received no assurances from the government that this intervention, which is meant to protect consumers against supply shortages, won't end up working against them on price. The government also says that these measures are temporary, but they can create dependency amongst suppliers, within regions and amongst consumers, which could render their future withdrawal politically difficult. Regions that come to expect stable, supported supply will likely push back hard if that supply is wound back during what could prove to be a long, protracted and difficult war. We've seen that before with the withdrawal of household energy rebates during an ongoing cost-of-living crisis. I'm worried, again, that this government, through its potential short sighted implementation of reactive measures, can only provide a temporary prop-up to Australia's energy markets.

It's also a concern that fuel markets are volatile. Prices move quickly, sharply and often without warning. Giving the EFA authority to enter derivatives and hedging arrangements means that the Commonwealth will now be exposed to those movements. If markets turn, those losses won't disappear; they'll land on the Commonwealth's balance sheet. They'll land on the taxpayer. In effect, the government could be stepping in on national interest grounds to take on projects that private markets have looked at and chosen to walk away from. We should ask ourselves: if the private sector won't touch cost- or risk-prohibitive projects, why should the Commonwealth?

This brings me to the questions that this bill has not answered: what savings or offsets have been identified by the Treasurer, and what fiscal guardrails are in place around this measure? We know that the government is appropriating $2 billion to respond to fuel security during the remaining three months of the 2025-26 financial year. But what happens beyond that? The government has not answered these questions. Until it does, Australians are being asked to approve a permanent and significant expansion of Commonwealth risk with no clear account of the ongoing cost.

There's also the question of oversight. The instruments that this bill authorises—derivatives, hedging, guarantees and price support mechanisms—are complex. They carry real tail risk and require active expert governance, but the government does not anticipate a review of these measures before 2029. At a time where the EFA could be actively hedging, stockpiling and extending guarantees across international supply chains, the parliament's primary safeguard is a report that may well not land for three years or more. If something goes significantly wrong in year 1, there will be no circuit breaker, no sunset clause. By the time the review arrives, the damage may already be done.

The concerns I have around this bill bring me back to my main point: the need for structural reforms and for some difficult conversations. We can't debate this legislation without saying the quiet part out loud. The real answer to Australia's energy security crisis is not stockpiles. It's not hedging arrangements. It's not a government agency buying and selling fuel for us on international markets. The real answer is reducing our dependence on international energy markets and improving our sovereign capacity to produce energy. Every dollar that we spend securing fossil fuel reserves is a dollar that we do not spend accelerating the renewable transition that would make these conversations and this legislation unnecessary. A country that's able to generate its own clean energy at home will not be and cannot be held hostage by wars in the Middle East, by volatile and unsafe shipping routes or by the pricing decisions of international fuel corporations. That is what Australia's genuine energy security future looks like, and this bill must not become a distraction from that goal or an excuse to delay it.

For every dollar put forward into securing additional fuel supply under this legislation, the government should reduce the fossil fuel subsidies received by major industries through the fuel tax credits scheme. While everyday motorists and small businesses are struggling with the cost of diesel, the government's fuel tax credit scheme is costing us $10.8 billion per year. That's $300 million a day or over $200,000 by the time I finish this speech. Fuel tax credits make diesel fuel use artificially cheap for offroad users, such as in mining. Fossil fuel companies themselves—coal miners like Glencore, Peabody, Yancoal, Mitsubishi, Whitehaven and Anglo American—are significant, large and ongoing beneficiaries from fuel tax credits. We have the wicked paradox in which Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospective is receiving a 52.6 cents per litre subsidy for its offroad use of diesel while truckies today are struggling to deliver groceries to our supermarkets and are still, until the bill passes the House, paying the heavy vehicle road user charge of 32.4 cents per litre. The full picture of this legislation is that the government is proposing to use taxpayer money to secure more fuel supply, supply that will then flow to the same fossil fuel giants who are already receiving billions of Australian dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

Ordinary Australians are underwriting both ends of the supply chain, and when those same Australians ask why prices remain high, I'm sure the government will point to the ACCC. Last week the government rushed legislation which increased the maximum penalties for breaches of competition and consumer law. The problem with that is that the former head of the ACCC Allan Fels has said that the commission actually has no real power to do anything. Price gouging is not illegal in relation to fuel. It is only illegal in relation to supermarkets, and even that ban hasn't yet come into force. Under our current laws, successful prosecutions of price collusion are rare because evidential barriers appear too difficult to overcome, especially when retailers don't have to provide reasons for raising their prices. It's simply not good enough. While the government has moved to halve the fuel excise and is lauding their national fuel security plan, we have no real security right now that this will translate into lower prices at the bowser because fuel price gouging remains completely legal and the government and the ACCC have no control over it.

So I call on the government to act quickly and with authority to give the ACCC real powers to prosecute price gouging across our whole economy, to legislate a whole-of-economy price gouging offence, to cut the mining and coal industry's fossil fuel subsidies dollar for dollar with what this legislation will cost taxpayers and to move to incentivise industry to decarbonise, not continue its dependence on diesel, oil and gas. I ask the government to accelerate the energy transition, to end our dependence on imported fuels and to increase our ability to capitalise on renewable energy from our sun and wind.

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