Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction) | Hansard source

We are supporting the Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief No. 2) Bill 2026 mainly because the idea of giving fuel excise relief was the coalition's. We went out, we announced it and we made sure that we put pressure on the government, and the government followed. It goes to show that, when the government follows the opposition, when the government follows the coalition, the government actually gets it right. They should do it more often because, whenever they follow their own noses on things, they get it so terribly wrong.

The budget is the latest case in point. When they listen to the coalition, they get things right. This is the clearest case in point that you will see. How did we get here? We got here because the government was asleep at the wheel when it came to what was happening with the fuel crisis. It's always highly, highly amusing when the Minister for Climate Change and Energy gets up and he quotes that I and other members here kept calling on him to get serious about this national fuel crisis because he was asleep at the wheel and that we were going to have trouble by the end of March, by the end of April, by the end of May or by the end of June. You name it, there were problems. It was because he was doing absolutely nothing about it, and he wasn't interested in doing anything about price either. What happened in the end—and we all remember this—is that the minister for climate change was left behind. The Prime Minister went overseas with his begging bowl because the Prime Minister all of a sudden understood that there was a real problem here. So he headed off overseas with his begging bowl to make sure that we had diesel, jet fuel, unleaded petrol, urea, and fertiliser—all critically important.

I don't think we'll ever forget that, just as the Prime Minister was heading off to Asia to make sure we had all those things, we had the minister for climate change saying, 'None of my counterparts is talking to me about fossil fuels.' So here's the Prime Minister out begging for fossil fuels in our region, and the minister for climate change is there saying, 'Oh, no-one wants to talk to me about fossil fuels.' Of all the bizarre things that he's done and said, that was the best of them all. His own prime minister, his own leader, is out there begging for fossil fuels, and he's saying, 'None of them wants to talk to me about it.' It's just bizarre. Anyway, the whole way he does everything, sadly, would be funny if it wasn't so serious what he's doing to the cost of energy in this country and what that's doing to households and industry.

But I turn back to this point here. The other lesson from this is: have we learnt a lesson? Because we are going to continue to need fossil fuels into the future, and we are seeing a lack of interest in actually making sure that we can produce those fossil fuels ourselves. We have to make sure that we can produce the oil that we need. We have to make sure that we can produce the gas that we need. We've got to make sure that we can refine that oil to make sure that we can become much more self-sufficient again when it comes to the key drivers of our economy.

I think that many Australians but, in particular, the government failed to understand very early on how important diesel, in particular, is to our economy. It still drives our mining sector, our agriculture sector and our land transport sector. It absolutely drives them. Without diesel, we're in a world of pain. I say this to the government that not only do we have to make sure that we can refine and that we've got enough supply of diesel, fertiliser, jet fuel and other fuels; we've also got to understand that you've got to make sure they're affordable. That's what the excise relief does. It makes sure they are affordable.

I say this as a word of warning, because it never goes away that the government with the Greens are always looking to do things together—we've seen them do a very dangerous deal with the Greens on the budget—and the diesel fuel rebate, sadly, is always in their sights. What we should be doing—

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