Andrew Willcox (Dawson, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Sovereign Capability) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, Australia is in the grips of a fuel crisis and, for regional Australians, fuel is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity. Unlike those that live in the city, regional Australians do not have the luxury of just being able to jump on a train or on a bus to get to work. Fuel is how we have the means to make a living. It's how we get our kids to school; it's how our businesses and farms keep running. But, when the pumps are empty, our regional communities simply grind to a halt.

That's why the coalition yesterday launched a real-time reporting tool, 'No Fuel Here'. If you open www.nofuelhere.com.au, we need to give our community a direct way to report shortages as they happen in real time. This website was created because the official reports from Canberra simply do not match the reality of what is happening on the ground. We needed a way to bypass the bureaucracy and get the truth directly from people at the pump. This platform turns local frustration into hard evidence. We need to demand action from this Albanese Labor government. It will ensure the voices of regional Australians are not drowned out by city-centric statistics. Regional Australia depends on fuel like nowhere else, and, when the pump runs dry, our communities stop moving. This tool gives every Australian the power to report a shortage and put pressure on this government to act.

We've been assured by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy that there is no supply crisis. Take his word for that; let's see what happens. But there is definitely a distribution crisis. There is definitely a distribution issue. If the supply is right, it's simply not getting where fuel is needed the most. As I've said before, it takes nearly two weeks for global wholesale prices to change at our local bowsers, yet we've seen prices jump 40 cents in an afternoon. These aren't market forces. This is war profiteering, and the ACCC needs to be instructed by the Treasurer to show some teeth and prosecute those who are doing the wrong thing. Australians are already experiencing a Labor created cost-of-living crisis. Adding fuel crisis to the already difficult decisions they have to make each and every day is something that the people of Dawson and the people of Australia should not have to do.

So why should the residents of Dawson, who've had nothing to do with the tensions in the Middle East, have to pay extortionate prices for fuel? We're calling on this government to make the ACCC do their job and stop fuel price gouging.

Dawson is the biggest cane-growing area in the country, and I'd like to highlight some things from the freshly inked EU deal. There's a press release from CANEGROWERS titled:

Raw Deal—Sugar Shortchanged in EU Deal

It's as follows:

CANEGROWERS has slammed the outcome for sugar in the long-awaited Australia-EU Free Trade Agreement as a complete failure, saying it fails cane farming families and Australian sugar manufacturers and falls well short of what producers had been seeking.

"This is a horrendous outcome for Australia's cane growers," CANEGROWERS CEO Dan Galligan said.

"For the past decade we have made our needs abundantly clear to the Australian Government … There is no meaningful commercial access for sugar in this deal.

"The market access Australia has achieved is extremely small—less than 2% of Europe's import requirement and well below what Brazil and its Mercosur partners secured last year, which was around four times larger than Australia's outcome."

"Compounding this, the deal delivers no growth, no pathway to expand access and effectively locks growers into a bad deal for the next generation.

I also speak to all the other collectives, CANEGROWERS, QCAR, Kalamia and AgForce. I have not found one cane farmer happy with the EU deal. (Time expired)