I rise to support the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026, the Domestic Gas Reservation (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026 and the Domestic Gas Reservation Levy Bill 2026. In doing so, I congratulate the ministers who have put these bills together: the Minister for Resources, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, the Minister for Industry and Innovation and the Minister for Science. This is part of the government's wider strategy to bring back manufacturing in Australia, as the government says, for a future made in Australia.

Former prime minister Paul Keating said that 'if you change the government, you change the country'. The reason for the economic dislocation that we have in the community today and in working-class communities especially, like the one that I grew up in and the one that I represent today, is that—we have seen three things happen to our economy over the last 30 to 40 years: privatisation, economic rationalism and unfettered free trade. On that last point, to me, unfettered free trade means that we absolutely should have lower tariffs. It would be the silliest thing to put tariffs up to make imports more expensive for consumers in Australia. But what unfettered free trade has meant is that our local manufacturing industries are competing against state owned and state subsidised industries overseas. For that we have seen the destruction, the utter collapse, of our textile industries in Australia and we have seen our manufacturing industry teetering on the brink of utter collapse.

I listened to the UK prime minister deliver his speech to the party conference a couple of weeks ago. He put it slightly better than me, but it was still those three main things: privatisation, deregulation and deindustrialisation. It has devastated our communities and it has caused the angst and the inequality that we see today. Change the government, and you change the country. Since 2022 we have seen through the Albanese Labor government a change in direction and a rejection of the status quo. We are not going to just stand by and watch our foundational industries—the industries that we have left—completely collapse and fall apart.

I like to surprise people. It's easy for a Labor member to quote Paul Keating. It's not so easy for a Labor member to quote Peter Dutton or to say that one of their economic role models is a Liberal premier. But I can do both of those things. One of my economic role models is Thomas Playford, who was the premier in South Australia from the forties—during World War II, in fact—until the seventies. His economic philosophy, as it was around the country, was about investing in public housing and public energy. You saw with that government, which was carried on by the Dunstan Labor government that came after him, an investment in public housing, with a strategy to keep the cost of living and rents down for workers. That meant that the pressure would be off wages, which was what attracted manufacturing businesses.

If you look at the suburb of Elizabeth, it was a suburb of public housing. It was built around the car industry—in fact, it was built for the car industry—to keep the pressure off wages and to keep rents down, but living standards could be so high. In fact, the high point of South Australian public housing was sometime in the nineties, where something like more than 40 per cent of rentals in South Australia were public housing. Then, across the country, 20 per cent of rentals in the country were public housing, but today that figure is 10 per cent. If you go to the Gold Coast, to parts of the area that I represent, it is five per cent. And it's unsurprising—I mean, you think about it: if you want to support small business, how does small business properly pay the wages of somebody that's got to spend $800 a week to pay for a crappy little three-bedroom house in the outer suburbs of South-East Queensland? Eight hundred dollars a week! How does a small business really pay those wages? But they have to, because that's what the cost of living is.

So the strategy was with energy. Here I'll quote Peter Dutton—not that I'll do that a lot. I thought Peter Dutton really summed it up perfectly when he said—in fact, I've forgotten the exact quote, but the punchline was 'energy is the economy'. Energy is not just part of the economy; energy is the economy. When you look at us, you'll see we're a society born of the Industrial Revolution—an economy born of the Industrial Revolution, of steam and coal of the 19th century, of oil and the internal combustion engine of the 20th century, and of electricity and renewable energy of the 21st century. Energy is the absolute—as I said, it's not just the bedrock of the economy; energy is the economy.

So it was that, in South Australia, but around Australia as well, we had state owned, publicly owned, energy assets which provided electricity as an essential service, not to make a profit off pensioners but to give a break to people, to keep the cost of living down for people, and also to keep the cost of business down for manufacturing. Publicly owned housing and publicly owned energy assets really made Australia, after World War II.

In the eighties and the nineties, we started to follow this mind virus of economic rationalism where we thought that the private sector could always do better. I'm all about entrepreneurialism. Anybody that has sat through one of my speeches would know that I quite often talk about my own experiences building my own companies. The spirit of entrepreneurialism is the spirit of being human. It's about following your passion. It's about finding your dreams and pursuing them. It is about what you'll always find, I think, when it comes to really following your passion—that is, it is about finding the best contribution that you can make to other people. That's, to me, what entrepreneurialism is. That's, to me, what business is. The best businesspeople that I ever saw, that I ever worked with and worked for, were people that didn't really care about the money; they just had this burning idea: to help other people. The fact that they could make money out of it—well, that was almost secondary.

There is a role for government that has not been played by government since the 1990s. This government is about reclaiming that role by getting in there and, initially, protecting what's left—protecting our foundational industries, whether it's steel in Whyalla, whether it's lead in Port Pirie, whether it's aluminium in Gladstone and Newcastle or whether it's copper in Mount Isa and Townsville. It's about getting in there and protecting those foundational industries, because that is all that we have left, and it is about building on those foundational industries as well. So it is that we have, through the Future Made in Australia, a strategy to bring manufacturing and sovereign capability back to our country and to breathe life back into the working-class communities that are struggling to get by.

One of the key parts of this is the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill, because what this bill does is to literally pump energy back into the economy. It is about this recognition that what made Australia great, post World War II, was cheap energy—which, by the way, is the reason I think it is such a wrench for our economy to transition away from coal. Not only has coal been such a important part of mining towns like the one I came from—which is not a coalmining town, of course—around Australia; cheap coal has been also such an important input into the economy. Moving away from that is a wrench both for the communities that dig it out of the ground and for the whole of Australia that relies on the cheap promise that coal gave to us for so many decades. So it has been a wrench.

As the world transitions away from coal, and as our coalfired power plants become obviously uneconomical to replace, we can't just throw our hands up and let the market do it, because the market's not doing it. Leave it up to the market, and all our gas goes overseas. So we have to intervene. We have to make sure that our strategic, domestic and economic interests are looked after. And that's what is at the heart of this gas reservation.

It is also, I think, a recognition that we are saving the gas companies from themselves. Either the gas companies have nobody advising them on public relations at the moment, or they're just wilfully blind to it, but the pressure that is out there in the community for the gas companies to actually do their fair share is overwhelming. And, unless they come to the party and realise that this is actually going to help them keep their own social licence, they really could lose their social licence. At the end of the day, this is our gas. It belongs to us. And this is about making sure that we get the benefit of this natural resource that belongs to us.

I'd also just make the point that this bill is very sensible and practical. It recognises that there are existing contracts, and it respects those existing contracts with international suppliers. That is important for a variety of reasons. One, of course, is that Australia needs to be a good place to do business. International companies need to know that the rules aren't just going to change instantly, under their feet. Those current arrangements need to be respected. The other thing—and it's been shown in this fuel crisis, since February this year—is that gas has given us enormous leverage on an international stage. It's given us the ability to really secure the petrol and diesel that we need to run, because those countries need the gas that we have to run. It is important, in the world that we are in today, that the relationships we have with countries like Japan, which are so critical to the future of Australia's success, are maintained by respecting the contracts that exist at the moment.

This is not a radical tear-up of the way things are working, but it is a change of the status quo. It is a change of the status quo, because we need to look after our own energy security first. We can no longer be a country at the end of international supply lines. We have to come first. Our people have to come first. Our communities have to come first, both in security and in opportunity.

So I commend this bill to the House. This bill sits in that great strategy of Future Made in Australia. It sits there alongside Rewiring the Nation, where we are modernising the grid for the energy economy of the 21st century. It sits beside the National Reconstruction Fund, where this government is investing in businesses like Gilmour Space, in the heart of Forde, my electorate, where we are literally looking to the stars for the future of Australian manufacturing. It sits within the strategy of maintaining and defending our foundational industries around regional Australia—the foundational industries that keep the cities going. I commend this bill to the House.

Debate interrupted.