And rentals! When 90 per cent of Victorian households using gas for heating, cooking and making sure they had proper hot water, there wasn't a huge degree of enthusiasm from the people of Victoria. Their answer was actually: 'We'd quite like to keep using gas. We have the infrastructure and the sunk investment. There is one thing we would like, though: cheaper gas.' That's because gas prices have continued to rise, and it has put further and further pressure on Victorian households.

Why has it taken the Albanese government so long to secure gas supply? It's because the Labor Party doesn't want gas. We know they don't. I still remember when the Minister for Climate Change and Energy—that rapscallion—said that the Kurri Kurri power plant in New South Wales would never be fuelled by gas. It was only going to be fuelled by green hydrogen. That was before the 2022 election. If it wasn't so serious, it would be absolutely hilarious. He made that bold promise and now goes into the House of Representatives and says that he never really believed in hydrogen and its potential as part of the Australian economy, even though he explicitly ruled out the Kurri Kurri Power Station using gas before the 2022 election. I don't even know what more to say about the Labor Party's approach to gas. It's farcical. There is literally more hot air coming out of this government's mouth than is being generated by the gas that they support—but here we are.

After being dragged kicking and screaming in a tantrum-like manner by the coalition—who argued at the last election that we desperately need a domestic gas reservation to secure gas supply because we need to get prices down for Australian consumers, that we need to make sure we have a secure supply for our sovereign needs so that we can reindustrialise and back-in industry—with Labor fighting it every step of the way in the lead-up to that election; after having successfully won that election, Labor has now accepted that maybe, just maybe, we need a gas reservation. Imagine that radical proposition. Now they think they're geniuses, as the member for La Trobe can no doubt attest. They think they're geniuses because they've stumbled on the necessity of some component of secure supply.

But let's talk about the practical reality of what a secure supply means. While we talk about it in the nation's parliament, and we think about these big infrastructure projects and everything else that goes on, obliging energy companies to make sure there's secure supply, it's actually much more human. Let's think about the pensioner who opens up their electricity bill and their gas bill and wonders whether they can afford it. Increasingly, with the government's active inflation agenda, they are having to make choices—because they're going to the supermarket and paying more and getting less. That means one thing. They've got to make choices about things like their electricity bill and their gas bill.

In Victoria, pensioners are opening their gas bills—90 per cent of households use gas for cooking and heating their homes—and enduring incredible shocks and having to make tough choices about their priorities, between whether they can afford to eat a protein or whether they end up having bread and butter for dinner. If anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, they don't understand the challenges that a lot of pensioners face and the choices they face. What about the family who has watched energy prices rise by around 40 per cent under the life of this government and now stands at the supermarket with their red basket or their trolley deciding what goes back on the shelf? Australia 2026, and the choice for Australian families is to put food in their supermarket trolley or pay their gas bill. Well, how do I put it? That is not something to be proud of under the Albanese government, but that is their legacy.

They're not alone, because these are the choices being faced by small-business owners. Gas is a critical part of the infrastructure to keep their businesses going. It's the baker. It's the restaurateur. It's the dry cleaner. Often getting up at a sparrow's fart to work and employ other Australians and provide a service to their fellow Australians. They're faced with higher costs, rising costs, and no end to those costs because of the policies of the Albanese government, particularly around their gas. They are people who rely on gas to open their doors every morning. It isn't a choice. That's the business. Gas is necessary to provide an essential service to the community. They're just watching their costs rise while their revenue falls. There's been a 15 per cent decline in profitability, according to the most recent ABS data. And, of course, they're not just facing the cost rises from gas; they're also facing cost rises from the surcharge ban, inflation, rising wages et cetera et cetera, while the revenue is only going into decline. In fact, dry cleaning is one of the small businesses most likely to face closure and most likely to face increases in costs.

That's at the small business end. Think about the big businesses, the medium-sized businesses and the manufacturers. They employ a lot of local people, but, more importantly, they're part of the industrial strength of our country. Gas is not some sort of esoteric option for them. It's necessary for feedstock. They literally need to turn on the gas to provide the temperature often required for things like melting metals. They're quietly asking whether they've got a future in this country at all between all the rising costs being imposed on them by the Albanese government—and, even more so, because of whether they can secure supply. This is not an abstract concern; this is literally one of the biggest challenges facing our country.

During the last election, the number of times secure gas supply at affordable prices came up when I spoke to small-business people and households and pensioners was incalculable. It came up so often. I still remember going to a dry cleaner in Sandringham and them saying, 'The No. 1 issue for me is gas supply.' He and his husband were desperate to secure the gas supply they needed at the price they needed so they could keep their small business operating. I heard this all over the electorate, but it falls on deaf ears under the Albanese government. They're paying more, and, of course, that doesn't just come with the issue around their business; it comes with the human dimension around anxiety, and it also comes down to whether people can afford to heat their homes during winter. We've just gone through a winter, and now, fortunately, we're in the period of spring, but winter comes around again cyclically, and this is going to be a big challenge for Australian households, particularly for those on fixed incomes and low incomes, in the forthcoming 12 months.

We are a resources superpower. We should never have a shortage of these important resources, but the government has chosen to. The Albanese government has actually chosen shortages, along with state Labor governments. They have actively chosen shortages, which have sold Australians out and sold industry out. We are not going to oppose this legislation for a gas reservation through the House of Representatives. We have a deep distrust of the Albanese government's approach, because, as I said, the government was dragged, kicking and screaming, to a position of eventually adopting a gas reservation. We're going to make sure of that through our process and through the Senate.

This government has no interest in transparency. It was only yesterday we were being given lectures by the government about how things needed to be changed and how we needed to be a kinder and gentler parliament. The Prime Minister was trying to model his best behaviour. But it was only a little less than 24 hours before the member for Watson, the Leader of the House, was running gag orders through the parliament and the Treasurer was introducing legislation into the parliament that he hadn't even bothered to tell anybody about and had tried to sneak through just before midnight yesterday. He doesn't want to have any proper consultation or engagement with the opposition unless we demand it. Now we've seen the government continue to try and sneak through legislation—ram it through the House of Representatives, ignore parliamentary democracy, ignore the will of the people and, certainly, ignore members of the House of Representatives.

We're not going to oppose this legislation, but we are very concerned about what the government is going to do. We are very concerned about whether the government is actually going to get this right. We've seen this a lot during other debates. The government says they're going to bring down prices. Do you remember the $275 reduction in electricity prices? It never happened. Do you remember how they kept saying that all of their energy policies were not just going to deliver $275 of cheaper prices, but going to deliver wholesale price reductions across the entire economy because we were going to enter into a new Labor-Greens nirvana? That's not the lived experience. Do you remember when the Treasurer and the Prime Minister said that we turned the inflation corner? Because, of course, there was no link between government spending and inflation and higher interest rates! It was about March 2025. Since then, the Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Australian people and even some of the Treasurer's own colleagues have called that out and made the point that the government is now the key driver of inflation. Once again, the claim of delivering lower prices for Australian households has not materialised under this government.

In fact, Australians are slowly being targeted by this government increasing costs and punishing and humiliating people, removing their basic sense of dignity because they do not have an understanding of economics or the consequences of that implementation. If there were any debate about that, you would just need to go and look at the absolute—I'm not sure it's parliamentary, but there's a word I want to use about the response and the consequences of the last federal budget, which, in part, provided the finances to be able to implement this policy. If you read the Australian Financial Review's analysis from a couple of weeks ago, which went through who said what at different times and who understood the consequence of that budget at different stages, the one thing that was abundantly clear was the government had absolutely no idea what was going on before the budget, when they were designing it and when they were printing it, and they still don't have any idea how they're going to go through with its full implementation. When we raise concerns about this government's gas reservation policy, we don't do so lightly; we do because we know there is a consistent track record of behaviour from a deeply immoral government that is arrogant and fundamentally misunderstands the consequences of its actions.

The consequences of this government's actions is not to build a stronger Australia; it's to weaken it. It's to kneecap small business, undermine families, increase costs on households, and make it harder for Australians to get ahead. I think we need to be very clear eyed that the mad ideology of the Labor Party, as they have co-opted parts of the radical Greens agenda, is selling Australia short. But it isn't just one in some sort of ideological nirvana or isolation. The impacts are human. The impacts are real, because the small businesses of this nation are be brutally punished and tortured by this government. Families are being kneecapped and undermined by the Albanese government. Those that risk capital and want to grow and build a better future are being actively undermined by this government, and some of the most marginalised in our country, particularly those on low incomes, are being made to go cold during winter because this government does not understand the consequences of its decisions. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.