Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was flabbergasted to read a press release from my colleague Senator Boswell that said that our national fuel deficit is running at something like 55.6 per cent of our total trade deficit. This is an astonishing figure. It crystallises the current debate on the fuel price spike we are all living through. Never mind prices going up today, the writing is on the wall and we have to get used to living with rising fuel costs for the future unless we can change our dependency on oil. Senator Boswell was commenting on this very fact when he urged a more determined move towards ethanol supplements, particularly by the New South Wales and Victorian governments.

The chamber would know that I have been an ardent champion of ethanol for many years. Several weeks ago, I wrote an article for one of our local papers about today’s fuel price shock. In the course of gathering information, I came across further disturbing information. Australia has a mere 0.3 per cent of the world’s remaining oil reserves, while the United States has four per cent and the Middle East has about 66 per cent. The story with natural gas reserves is equally unfavourable for us, with Australia having two per cent of world reserves, the United States five per cent and the Middle East 36 per cent. On the other hand, the United States has 26 per cent of the world’s remaining coal reserves, Australia has eight per cent and the Middle East has just 0.3 per cent. If we could only turn coal to oil—and we can. The technology exists, but the cost is still far higher than extracting fuel from oil, and that will remain the case for many years to come.

In the early 1970s, during the first oil shock, the Australian coal industry began experiments with liquefying brown coal—a commodity which was in large supply, particularly in Victoria, but which was highly polluting because of carbon dioxide emissions. Nazi Germany used coal based synfuel to power its military aircraft during World War II when the country was shut off from oil supplies. The high price of synfuel has kept it from enjoying wider use, but, now that the price of oil has shot up above $70 a barrel, synfuel has suddenly become a cheaper alternative. The trick, of course, is to somehow contain or limit the damaging carbon dioxide emissions. Industry is not about to charge down the coal path until the technology becomes cheap enough for it to become commercially viable.

Today’s oil crisis is fuel for the doomsayers, some of whom are advocating a fortress-mentality alternative of self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, that is regressive thinking and it does not work. Take the case of Cuba, for instance. When oil supplies from the USSR dried up, the Cubans opted to go back in time to a rudimentary society. More pushbikes were brought in to replace cars, oxen replaced tractors, rickshaws replaced taxis, small farms replaced distribution systems and self-sufficiency replaced trade with the global market. What was the end result? Cuba is still a basket case, impoverished and oppressed, with masses of the population doing a runner to Florida at the first opportunity.

This is not something Australians want, but there are some in our community who would delight in subscribing to an ‘us against the world’ lifestyle. I am sorry, but I do not intend to become an isolationist or a reclusive. I will not gather comfort from being a self-inflicted victim. Rather than seeing this as an insurmountable crisis, we should be seeing it as an opportunity to free ourselves from our oil shackles and to move on. We have done it before and we can do it again. (Time expired)

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! In accordance with sessional order 193 the time for members’ statements has concluded.