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

():  by leave—Whilst there is no money for Tomago, there is apparently $18.2 billion further for intermittent power rollout, the intermittent power swindle—the solar panels, the wind turbines, the transmission lines. I note that the Treasurer only mentioned the words 'climate change' once in his speech the other night, which was probably a very clever thing because it's terribly unpopular. We've the dearest electricity prices and the most unreliable electricity, basically, in the OECD.

It is also important that we secure fuel, diesel—we've all agreed on that. I've been doing my very best to work with people such as Chris Monet in San Diego and with a range of consortiums trying to bring diesel in on the spot market from Singapore. The issue is that we—some time ago, last month—passed the legislation to derisk this, because it costs about $250,000 to hire the boat and about $90,000 a day to push it through the water. You might be up for $200 million or $300 million on a punt. If it goes against you—if you go out of the money—you'll go broke. So we have to derisk it. The derisking process was done through EFA, Export Finance Australia.

I have to say I'm incredibly disappointed. It is so slow. These deals are not turning around; they're bogged down. People are coming out and asking, 'How long before you can get this through?' And they're hearing 'A month—weeks.' When you're buying on the spot market, it's bang—it's like that. We've had product at $600 a tonne, and at Platts it's at $1,100 a tonne. And we can't finalise the deal to get it through so we can land it here. It's not one deal of 100 million litres; it's deal after deal after deal that we can do. So I plead with the government: please get going on this. Go down to the department, bang some heads together and make things move, because we're losing these deals and you can't tell big players just to hang around for their money.

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