I rise to speak on the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill and related bills. Australia's gas is a shared national inheritance. It belongs to all of us, and how we share it matters. Right now Australian households and businesses compete with international buyers for their own gas, and too little of the proceeds of selling it come back to the public who own it. I support the principle of domestic gas reservation. The question I want to put to the House is one every resource decision should answer: what is in it for the public?

Western Australia asked that question in 1979. When the WA parliament ratified the North West Shelf agreement, the state did not simply approve a project; it struck a bargain. The state energy commission became the anchor customer on a 20-year take-or-pay contract and built the Dampier to Perth pipeline. In return, Western Australians got first priority in both reserve allocation and deliverability. Read that debate and you'll find members on both sides argued about royalties, foreign ownership, local content and whether a public stake should be taken. Government and opposition disagreed sharply, but both understood that they were deciding how a public resource would serve the public over the long term. Nearly 50 years on, WA's reservation is imperfect, but it has helped buffer domestic prices from international swings.

The east coast took a different path. Between late 2010 and mid-2011, three LNG gas projects at Gladstone were approved and committed around 25 million tonnes a year of export capacity, up from zero in less than a year. Nobody paused to ask how domestic supply would be secured or how the public would benefit. There are people in this House who presided over these decisions. An east coast reservation is 16 years overdue.

The problem the bill seeks to resolve is real. The gas market review found Australia produces around four times as much gas as it consumes, yet AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, is warning of domestic shortfalls from 2030. Since east coast exports began in 2015, production has roughly tripled—so have prices. Gas that once sold for under $5 a gigajoule now contracts at $12. It's in part thanks to a price cap that it's not higher. At the height of the crisis, Australians were offered gas at prices as high as $60 a gigajoule. The minister called this unacceptable. She was right.

I think we do need to stop and think and reflect on this, because at the moment there is much discussion about supply in gas and how we just need to increase supply and that's going to lower prices, but we have seen a situation in this country, on the east coast, where we tripled supply and then the prices almost tripled as well. That shows, I think, the fallacy of that argument and also the need to get the settings right, because gas prices really matter. Households paid around $1 billion more for gas in 2023-24 than in 2014-15, and businesses paid a further $3 billion. That is before counting the impact on electricity prices. Gas still supplies around a quarter of all energy Australians use and more than 80 per cent of the Northern Territory's electricity.

Domestic consumption on the east coast has fallen by around a quarter. Some of that fall is good news—households electrifying and leaving gas behind. Some of it is damning. Manufacturing closures driven by high gas prices have cost at least 1,200 jobs. The Gibson Island urea plant in Brisbane shut at the end of 2022 because it could not secure affordable gas. When the war in Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz this year, the government had to scramble for fertiliser.

High prices have not made the public rich. This is the problem. Rising prices and record volumes should have delivered strong royalties and resource rents. Instead, the PRRT collects nothing from Queensland export projects, and taxpayers are now being asked to prop up energy-intensive industry. Four interventions in under a decade—the ADGSM, the heads of agreement, the Gas Market Code and now a reservation scheme—are not the sign of a functioning market. They are attempts to claw back access to a resource the public already should own.

The Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026 creates a licensing regime for LNG exports from 2028. Each exporter must supply the domestic market with up to 20 per cent of what it exports. Each year, the Australian Energy Regulator will forecast domestic demand at a 10 per cent buffer, subtract what non-exporters will supply and share the remainder among exporters. The minister can reduce an individual exporter's obligation because of LNG contracts signed before December 2025, infrastructure constraints or existing state reservation arrangements. The companion bills impose a cost recovery levy on licence holders, repeal the ADGSM and rewrite the Gas Market Code, removing the price cap. The minister says the scheme will deliver a reliable supply of affordable gas at home. This is an unobjectionable goal. The question is genuinely whether the bill will deliver it.

So I come back to the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026. I support the intent of the bill. Australian resources should benefit Australians. The government has consulted widely and worked across portfolios, and I thank the minister for her office's engagement with mine. I support requiring reserved gas to be supplied, not merely offered. I support excluding renewals and extensions from the protection for existing contracts, and I support the provision allowing demand reduction and renewable gas to count towards the obligation.

But let's now move to my concerns. This is an exceptionally complex bill built around a simple proposition: our resources should serve the national interest and exporters should be net contributors to the domestic market. What makes it so difficult is that we are retrofitting a policy onto projects that were built without one, and we are trying to do so without breaching existing contracts and creating so much sovereign risk that future investment evaporates or atrophies. Yet, across nearly 200 pages, the questions that matter are still left for ministerial decision or rules not yet written: how much gas is supplied domestically, by whom and what counts as supply. The test for whether the gas is additional is not in the bill. It sits in a baseline method the regulator has not yet made, in case-by-case approvals that need not be published and in a power for ministers to declare gas additional in whatever circumstances an instrument specifies.

The minister says the scheme is predictable and proportionate, but the obligation changes every year. Individual exporters can be granted adjustments on regulator advice that need never be published. That is not a rules based reservation scheme; it is a scheme that depends on active, ongoing management by multiple ministers and the regulator, and it will only be as good as the next decision. Consistency depends on later decision-makers. It raises the question: how is this more certain than the intervention it replaces?

There are real risks, and the impact analysis states them plainly. Some high-cost production may become uneconomic, reducing production and constraining supply. The Productivity Commission in 2015 and the ACCC in 2016 both cautioned that a reservation scheme could distort market signals and prove inefficient. Producers call the 110 per cent target a sugar hit—an indirect price control, whose target the government will not state. Rystad Energy estimates that, while most existing gas can be produced for under $10 a gigajoule, the marginal cost of supply rises to $13 to $14 by the mid-2030s, beyond the current price cap. If domestic-only producers cannot compete, they will sell to the exporters. As drafted, an exporter that buys a domestic producer turns that producer's output into its own gas, appearing to bypass the additionality test altogether. That concentrates ownership, undermining competition. Also, reservation alone can only supply around half of the current east coast demand. The ongoing viability of domestic producers remains essential.

Other countries offer lessons. Norway and Qatar control allocation directly through state ownership. The UK taxes windfall profits to subsidise energy users. The United States vastly expanded supply to meet export capacity. Indonesia shows what happens when a reservation is combined with a price cap, falling production and rising demand: rationing, falling investment, and, this month, a public dispute with Singapore over cut supply.

I'm also concerned about cost and trust. The impact analysis puts the regulatory burden at $134 million over 10 years—more than double the status quo. We know from the PRRT that complexity, combined with information asymmetry, favours industry over the public. I'm also concerned the government will treat this scheme as a reason not to reform how we tax gas. And we must reform how we tax gas.

None of these are reasons not to reserve gas. There are reasons to get it right, which means legislating and administering the scheme in a way that is both predictable and transparent. So what is needed? Some changes would make the scheme more predictable and give confidence that it will deliver gas to the domestic market that is genuinely additional.

Firstly, there's additionality. The obligation can be met by either own gas or additional gas. Defining 'additionality' is central to ensuring gas doesn't leak from the domestic market. Those principles belong in the act, not in a method the regulator has yet to write. The minister should not hold an open-ended power to declare gas additional, and existing production should not be considered as additional, case by case, by the regulator.

Secondly, there are acquisitions. An exporter should not be able to meet its obligation by buying a domestic producer and relabelling that producer's output as its own. This would meet the domestic supply obligation but would only serve to concentrate supply, not add to domestic volumes.

Thirdly, there's transparency. The regulator's advice on adjustments, every production base line and every approval of additionality should be published, with reasons. If these decisions cannot be reviewed, they should be at least seen, and volumes shouldn't be able to hide from scrutiny behind claims of commercial sensitivity.

Fourth, there's export capacity. Gas exports should be limited to the capacity we have today. We can honour our existing commitments without signing new ones. Our trade partners are transitioning away from fossil fuels, and our fields are in decline. Gas infrastructure built today is tomorrow's stranded asset and locks in decades of decommissioning.

This bill is a stopgap for two things we really need: a deliberate transition plan and natural resource stewardship. Reservation is not energy policy on its own. We also need a deliberate and coherent plan to get off gas. Neither the Net Zero Plan nor the Future Gas Strategy sets out one. The most obviously national-interest energy policy on offer is to run as much of Australia as possible on the thing that we have more of than anyone else and is hard to ship: sunshine. Once renewables are built, the fuel is free. Gas only gets more expensive as wells get deeper and pipelines get longer. Gas dependence is inflationary.

We need natural resource stewardship that delivers real public benefit. In 1979, the WA parliament debated royalties, public equity and how fast to produce a public resource. We need that debate again. The public is now co-investing tens of billions in critical minerals and energy-intensive industry through mechanisms that are hard to see and harder to scrutinise. The question the government must answer is what we, the co-investors, get in return. I will shortly release a white paper on how Australia should tax its resources better, to try and put some answers at least into the public domain on this and get some feedback.

We cannot keep tinkering with gas settings every few years. It undermines confidence in Australia as a place to invest, and it undermines the market. This bill is our chance to set rules that last. Western Australia got its share in 1979 because its parliament asked what was in it for the public. Sixteen years late, the east coast deserves the same answer to the same question and to have a clear rules-based answer written into law.