I rise to offer a contribution to the three bills the government have introduced: the Domestic Gas Reservation Bill 2026, the Domestic Gas Reservation (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026 and the Domestic Gas Reservation Levy Bill 2026. According to the government, this legislative package will deliver affordable energy, secure national gas supply and guarantee cheap gas for Australian industry and households. The problem for me is that I believe that this will deliver more red tape and more regulatory complexity and is another round of market intervention that creates confusion across the economy, particularly within the gas industry. As you are probably aware, Deputy Speaker Mascarenhas, I represent the Central Queensland seat of Flynn, which is home to the largest CSG gas industry, at Curtis Island at the Port of Gladstone. It gets its feedstock largely from Central Queensland and is a major exporter of liquefied natural gas and a major supplier to the domestic market around Australia.

The first question I would ask of my parliamentary colleagues, the wider public and the political commentators is simply this: why do we need a gas reservation policy? There might seem to be an obvious answer to many, but many people do not understand the complexities of the gas industry. There are a few anomalies that need to get pointed out in the whole argument. First and foremost is that the gas resources are the domain of the states not the federal government, with the exception of all the offshore gas. To make arguments around the PRRT, which is the Petroleum Rent Resources Tax, which applies specifically to offshore gas development—to apply that to onshore gas reserves and the companies that develop it, export it, sell it, supply it and so forth is nonsense, because it's not the same thing.

The states—in my case, Queensland—gained huge amounts of revenue from the big export companies that operate out of Gladstone and have developed that gas resource in Queensland. One of the problems with the whole gas reservation policy argument is, as I've said, the question of why we need a gas reservation policy. The answer is very simple. By and large, the New South Wales government and the Victorian government, in particular, have not developed their gas resources. Nor have they developed the infrastructure required to deliver that gas resource or to plug into the systems from Queensland, for example. You would argue that they need gas—and, yes, they do. At the moment, there is not a gas shortage—not right now—but it is projected that in the early 2030s there very much will be a gas shortage, particularly in Victoria. The reason for that is that their gas reserves in the Bass Strait, for example, are becoming depleted and, because they have a fracking ban and they don't want to develop their gas resources and want to electrify all of their business, industry and houses and so forth—the Victorian government, in their wisdom, has developed policies like new home builds can't have a gas stove, gas heating and so forth, because they want them to be all electric—that raises significant issues for the businesses and industries that need gas in the future. They will have to take up the shortfall of the rising cost of that gas.

Those states are asking now for the Queensland gas development companies to supply them with gas and saying, 'It is our right as Australians to have some of that gas, and they should supply it to us.' But that, again, raises some problems. If you are going to now mandate or manipulate the market, as per these bills, and demand that the gas companies supply gas at a lower rate than their export income, what you're actually saying is that Queensland should accept less revenue for the gas that they've developed and that gas should go to the states—in this case, New South Wales, Victoria et cetera—at a discounted rate. From a Queensland point of view, that is not fair. From an industry point of view, we're asking, by this these pieces of legislation, for them to accept less money for the contracts that they've already got in place. That is nothing more than market manipulation, and market manipulation never works. We've seen this many, many times over the years.

I don't doubt that the whole gas issue is complex, but it's got further ramifications, because if you're going to have a gas reservation policy that affects Queensland producers, for example, how do you apply that to Western Australia and the Northern Territory—to demand that those companies and businesses up there supply the same amount of domestic gas? How can you possibly make the price the same where there is just nowhere to use that gas? That adds another layer of complexity to the whole issue of how we get around supplying affordable and reasonable gas.

To me, the other problem with this bill is that it doesn't actually create any more gas. The only way you can create more gas is by convincing the states, particularly New South Wales and Victoria, to explore their gas reserves. To date, they have made no commitments to do that, but that is what needs to be done. This all goes back to the argument of whether we develop our fossil fuel industries. For many, many years, New South Wales and Victoria have chosen not to do that. But now they find themselves in a position where they can't do without gas because they need gas both to supply to their business and industry and to generate electricity with, because it is quite clear that the renewable energy sector is not capable of supplying 24/7 power, so that power generation has to be backed up by something else. In this case it has to be gas. So the whole issue is extremely complex.

There is another problem that the big companies have got if they're expected to reserve up to 20 per cent of their gas production for the domestic market and take less money for it. Does that add any incentive to spending and committing billions of dollars for further development in exploration, drilling wells and developing wells and building the necessary infrastructure that is required to do that? Having dealt with all the big companies—I speak to them on a regular basis—their arguments are, 'That doesn't look very good, and if you're going to manipulate the market, we're not very interested in committing and spending a whole lot of money redeveloping gas tenements and building the necessary infrastructure required.' And there are significant amounts of money required to do that.

Before I came to politics, I came out of the gas industry. I'm a high-pressure pipe welder by trade, and I can assure you there are billions and billions invested into that infrastructure in Queensland that I helped to develop back then when it was all being done. If you are required to duplicate some of those pipelines and some of the infrastructure required—that was 20 years ago when I worked in the business, and there would need to be substantially more money committed from the big gas companies with what we're requiring them to do. As I've said, the whole gas reservation policy is a complex argument. It is not well understood by many of my parliamentary colleagues. I have listened carefully to some of the comment been made, and, for me, one of the big problems is that everybody in the wider public and some of the political commentators simply do not understand that gas as a resource, when it's onshore in Australia, it is controlled by and is the domain of the states. And, unless the state governments are all on the same page in respect to developing these resources, you are going to have problems, and significant ones. And that's why we're all in the position we're in. I would just ask everybody to try and understand the reality of what the government is proposing here. For me, as I've said, it is more complexity in the whole problem. It is more market manipulation that actually doesn't guarantee any more gas, nor does it encourage the gas companies to develop the resources which we sorely need.