Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australian governments have failed to create wealth from the Commonwealth's ownership of vast reserves of oil and gas. I had thought it was a case of mismanagement and incompetence. Now it's clear: foreign owned oil and gas companies have too much political influence in Australia. I can think of no other explanation for the major parties arguing against the proposal in this bill.

Everyone seems to agree our natural resources should be developed for the benefit of the Australian community, but, when I propose putting that idea into the law, it is opposed by the government and the opposition. It's no wonder the primary vote of both major parties has fallen over the years and Liberal Party membership is falling faster than lemmings running off a cliff. In the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Benefit to Australia) Bill 2020, I propose to make the benefit of the Australian community a guiding principle in the interpretation of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006, or OPGGS Act. The Australian OPGGS Act is 1,150 pages of rules, rules which address in detail the awarding and management of petroleum licences, titles and safety and the jurisdiction of the regulator. The equivalent legislation in Norway is 39 pages long and is objectives based.

The Morrison government and the opposition say they oppose my 17-word amendment to the OPGGS Act because of unintended consequences. My view is that the proposed objects clause would fix many of the existing unintended consequences created by the narrow focus of the OPGGS Act, such as causing taxpayers to take on the liabilities of the Northern Oil and Gas company in February 2020, which include $4 million a week to maintain the floating platform known as the Northern Endeavour in non-production mode and the decommissioning costs of the Laminaria and Corallina oilfields in the Timor Sea, which are estimated to be up to $1 billion. It would fix unintended consequences like enabling foreign owned companies to hoard petroleum licences when Australian companies would be willing to put long-held licences into production and bring that gas onshore to Australia.

Unintended consequences have not proven to be a problem for Norway, who have made the benefit of the Norwegian society as a whole a guiding principle in their equivalent of the OPGGS Act, the petroleum activities act. Section 1.2 of Norway's petroleum activities act states that petroleum resources are to be managed for the benefit of the Norwegian society as a whole. Managing petroleum resources for the benefit of Norwegian society as a whole has created a sovereign wealth fund of around $1.4 trillion and funded the best aged-care system in the world. Australia will never have a sovereign wealth fund like Norway's, because the big political parties put their interests ahead of the interests of the Australian people.

My bill is not a tax bill and does not seek to change any tax law. In April 2017 Michael Callaghan handed his report to government. In 2019 the government responded to the Callaghan report by removing taxes from onshore gas. Here we are, four years later, and only now the government says it will consult with the industry on whether it would be willing to pay for our gas. Good luck with that! My bill is about increasing the supply of gas to Australia, with a view to lowering the price of gas in Australia and creating new jobs. How do government ministers sleep at night knowing that Australia is the only large gas exporter in the world where the domestic price of gas is higher than the exported price? The price differential is a massive problem for us. The multinationals are taking out and exporting $50 billion worth of Aussie gas. And, thanks to the deal our government has done, we get only around $200 million in taxes. The tiny nation of Qatar has a different approach. It receives around $26 billion in royalties on the gas it exports.

What is wrong with our government? We should be telling these multinationals, in regard to the retention leases in place, that they need to use it or lose it, not just build up never-ending tax credits at our expense. Our government is propping up the multinationals while denying Australian companies who want to develop the opportunity to extract gas. The government won't encourage the building of a pipeline from the north-west to the eastern states as promoted by Twiggy Forrest—a nation-building project worth tens of thousands of jobs that will benefit Australians for decades. We're paying more domestically for our gas than they are in the countries it's exported to.

Gas sets the price of electricity one day in four. As our aged coal-fired power stations are retired and replaced by gas-fired power stations, the price of gas will increasingly set the price of electricity. If we pay more for gas than our competitors do, we pay more for electricity than they do. If we want to sell what we make, and buy what we need, we must be able to buy our natural gas at the same price as our competitors overseas do, and we must be able to deliver globally competitively priced electricity to families and industry. The government fell into an elephant trap when it timetabled the closure of coal-fired power stations before it had a plan to replace the reliable electricity they provide to households and business. I say 'elephant trap' because the inability to supply electricity after the retirement of these coal-fired power stations was so obvious and so big that it should have been avoided.

The belt-and-braces solution successfully adopted by Germany has not been followed by this government. Instead, the Australian government has adopted the high-risk approach. It has bet the farm—your farm, my farm, everyone's farm—on finding solutions to grid stability problems caused by wind and solar power before we lose the reliable electricity provided by coal. In the next 15 years, nine coal-fired power stations in Australia are timetabled to be shut and with them the loss of 60 per cent of the reliable energy they produce. The Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales is the first of nine large power stations to be retired in the next 15 years. Its closure in April 2022 was announced in 2015. But, despite seven years notice, there is no replacement in sight for the 1,860 megawatts of reliable electricity Liddell now produces.

This third-term government has been so focused on the next headline or poll of public opinion that it has been caught without a plan to stop widespread blackouts, load shedding and energy demand management after Liddell's planned closure. The government has brought 12 months of reliable electricity supply to the nation by making Liddell's owner keep the coal-fired power station open until April 2023. Further, the government told the private sector they must make final investment decisions to replace 1,000 megawatts of Liddell's power by April 2021, or the government will step in and build a gas-fired power station at Kurri Kurri near Newcastle. The private sector have no intention of pulling the government out of the elephant trap, and their laughter at the government's fanciful plan echoes around the world. Since then, the owners of the Yallourn Power Station in Victoria have announced it will close four years earlier, and the elephant trap just gets deeper. The government has little choice but to build a gas-fired power station and increase the supply of gas.

The government's Clean Energy Finance Corporation Amendment (Grid Reliability Fund) Bill 2020 is intended to funnel a billion dollars into fixing grid reliability problems and allow the funding of the Kurri Kurri gas-fired power station. One Nation's view is the government should fund the building of new clean-coal-fired power stations rather than waste any more money subsidising weather-dependent electricity supply. Coal-fired power stations in the eastern states, including South Australia, will deliver the globally competitive electricity prices we need to manufacture steel, glass and aluminium. The government says it will not pick winners for the supply of electricity. But at every opportunity it distorts the market with subsidies and policy, and to keep the masses happy it talks about unproven technology like hydrogen. Where does the government think it's going to get the hydrogen? Huge amounts of heat created by gas-fired electricity will cleave off the hydrogen from either natural gas or water. But in any case hydrogen technology will not come in time to rescue the government.

The 2021-22 budget handed down last October announced the government wants to unlock the state and territory owned onshore gas reserves by spending $28.3 million in five strategic basins. Onshore gas providers have subsequently told the Australian Energy Market Operator the government's plans to increase onshore gas supply are unrealistic, which leaves the government with little alternative than to reform the gas laws relevant to the federally owned offshore gas. That brings me full circle back to the proposal contained in my bill. My proposed amendment to the OPGGS Act will have the effect of increasing the supply of gas to Australia, and eventually the price will be lowered. The Australia Institute supports the proposed addition to the objects clause, saying that offshore oil and gas industries contribute little to the Australian economy in terms of tax revenue and employment. Many projects represent a net cost to the Australian community as subsidies, clean-up costs, environmental impacts and depletion outweigh the relatively small tax and employment benefits. Prosper Australia also supports the proposed amendment. They say the current objectives of the OPGGS Act breach Australians' human rights to a fair return on the exploitation of their natural resources and call successive government failures in their brief as landlord-in-chief for all Australians. Perhaps the most surprising response to the proposed amendment comes from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, which argues against the proposal on the grounds it would create unacceptable uncertainty for titleholders and decision-makers. What about the owners? That is the problem. The OPGGS Act just benefits oil and gas companies. This must change.

My proposal is modest, but it's a positive first step. The Australian people need to make these issues election issues if they want to fund aged-care reforms and the NDIS. If Australians don't prioritise these issues, they can expect to spend their final days without the essential things we all need. As I've said continually in this House, we are just giving away our resources. We do not charge the multinationals and we don't hold them to account enough. When we got Prelude, which is a floating platform, the former resources minister, Senator Canavan, allowed them to hook it to the continental shelf. They don't pay anything like the others do of the 15 per cent domestic gas supply that comes across the borders of Western Australia. I've said in my speech that approximately $48 billion to $50 billion a year in gas is exported from Australia, and we are lucky to get about $200 million or $300 million in returns from that. Yet Qatar, who don't export as much gas as we do—we are the largest exporter in the world—make $26.6 billion from their gas. Papua New Guinea have their gas up there. We actually did the deal for them. They make more out of their gas—about $1 billion a year—than we do.

We in this country are the fools. Surely we can take note of what happened in Norway? They have exported their gas and they have got paid for it. They have a $1.4 trillion fund. What is wrong with the people in this place? Why are they not supporting the Australian people? These are our resources. We will never get them back again. We are not making the money out of it that we should. We are talking about aged care at the moment and how we are going to fund it. All they are worrying about is taxing the Australian people again. They are not looking at taxing the big multinationals. They have retention leases in Australia for 35 years. They keep signing off to give them another retention lease. They don't put on them, 'Use it or lose it.' They don't say, 'You have to develop this.' I know of Australian companies that actually want to be able to work those leases, but we won't give them the opportunity.

They are destroying our own companies. They are not making multinationals pay their fair amount of tax in this country and yet they are forcing the Australian people to pay higher prices for our gas than what we export it at. These are manufacturing industries. If you want to head down the path on climate change of going to wind and solar, it won't drive our manufacturing industries and provide jobs. It is about time they wake up to themselves in this place and look after the Australian people and our resources, because they belong to the people, and charge accordingly.