Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll start by doing a little bit of a throwback and recognising that WA kept Australia strong during the pandemic, and when the resource sector is strong, Australia is strong. What we saw during the pandemic was WA's iron ore and LNG exports keeping the nation afloat.

What I also recognise is that the resources that we have below the ground are not owned by companies. They are owned by all Australians, and a part of this means that there is a social contract. This social contract includes things like making sure we pay workers fair wages. My dad's a metal worker. He worked at Mt Charlotte out at Kalgoorlie and then out at Kambalda at the nickel mines, and he was a proud member of the AMWU. Another part of the social contract is around keeping workers safe. My dad is from a generation of workers where he has 9½ fingers.

There's also an importance for making sure we maintain strong environmental standards. When I was a little girl growing up out at the mines, we actually learnt how to rehabilitate mine sites. Again, a part of that social contract is action on climate change, and one of the things that I think is particularly interesting is that in Western Australia what we've seen over the last 10 years is a continual decarbonisation of our grid. What we've seen is more households integrate more solar onto their rooftops. What we've also seen is that coal-fired power stations are ill-equipped to deal with the modern grid. We've seen an introduction of gas into our system, and we've seen our emissions drop which has been fantastic. Gas has been a good dance partner for solar power.

What I'd also say is that with all dance partners, sometimes you might look around for alternatives. One of the meetings I had today was with Graham Arvidson from Australian Vanadium. Australian Vanadium isn't just a mining company. They're an integrated supply chain that's looking at making vanadium flow batteries. These are large batteries that can be scaled up significantly, and it'll be interesting to see its role in the grid in the future.

Going back to the social contract, a part of that is also about making sure that taxes are paid. I will point out that the Albanese Labor government's tax policy has not changed, but we are the party where households are getting tax cuts, which we're delivering for every taxpayer this year and next year. And one of the things we did during our first term was to have a look at the petroleum resource rent tax. Basically, we want to make sure that offshore gas companies pay more tax and they pay more tax sooner. This was a change we made, and it was absolutely the right call.

An additional change we also looked at was in relation to big multinational companies. We want to make sure they pay their fair share, and that's something we have worked on. We now have a 15 per cent minimum tax for these companies. We are also making these companies publicly report how much tax they pay. One of the things we saw under the coalition government was basically tax avoidance, where PwC effectively sold tax advice to help companies basically pay less tax. So dodgy! We have looked at boosting the tax office and making sure that the tax avoidance team has the resources to make sure we don't see this happening again.

I continue to see the role that oil and gas play in our society. The thing we're seeing across our communities at the moment is what comes out of our ground, but also what comes out of our bowsers. And do you know what? Households have been doing it tough. This is the reason why we introduced the fuel tax offset, which is basically 26c off fuel from April to June. And while we have been doing that, we have also been looking at supply.

One of the things we did is change the fuel standard. Rather than it being 10 parts per million of sulphur, we have changed it to 50 parts per million of sulphur. We basically want to ensure that fuel made in Australia can be sold to local places, but we cast the net wider and we can import more oil from other places.

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