Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Has the government received advice of any additional fuel ships bound for Australia that have been delayed or cancelled?

Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has already answered that question. The answer is no, and the situation remains, as the government has said on multiple occasions. There were six ships scheduled to arrive sometime in April that were cancelled, and they have been replaced, and then replaced by more, with three spot cargoes, and I expect that number of spot cargoes to increase materially with the passage of the government's bill to enable Export Finance Australia to support the import of fuel.

I can confirm that, for the month of April, orders that are finalised and confirmed amount to two billion litres of diesel, 719 million litres of petrol and 740 million litres of crude. Now, I'm not quite sure what case the opposition is trying to make here, but the case that the government is making is that the international circumstances are very uncertain. There is a massive impact on the global supply chain of oil and petrol, as we have been saying all through March, but our job is to secure as best we can the supply of fuel in those circumstances, and that's exactly what we've done. We have provided information on that transparently each and every day, and I'll continue to do so over Easter.