Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Fair cop. Well, we need to be relevant here, because I would like the minister to just tone it down. We just have this opportunity to support this motion. The issue that doesn't seem to come up or is not being explained here by the government at all is exactly what these stockpiles are and exactly what our requirements are.

Our requirements are actually not to hold a minimum amount of supply needs. The international agreement we have signed is to have a minimum amount of net imports. The reason we are more vulnerable today than we were 20 or 30 years ago is that our net imports have surged as our production of oil has dropped. At the start of this century, 25 years ago, we produced enough raw petroleum for 96 per cent of our needs. That is now below 50 per cent, because the Bass Strait has dried up. That's why we are more vulnerable. It's not the refineries that the Labor Party continues to distract about. It happened a few years ago. It's not these arbitrary amounts of fuel we have in a particular barrel in a particular location. The reason we are more vulnerable is that we are producing less oil, and the reason we are producing less oil is that we have put up massive barriers to the development of oil and gas in this country.

We have one state, Victoria, that has a ban on fracking across its whole state. They have some of the most prospective oil resources in that state because the Bass Strait, where we used to get it from, extends under the land area of Victoria as well. We know there are liquid fuels in the area, but because they ban fracking, they are untouchable. They are not going to be commercial without fracking. We've banned fracking across the whole area of the Canning Basin in north-western Australia, which is another long-term prospective oil resource for this country. It's not hard to work out that, if we don't drill for oil and gas, we will become vulnerable to the Strait of Hormuz and the conflicts that happen around the world.

Look at what the US has done. The US, under different administrations, has taken a different approach. They have drilled; they have fracked. They are now the world's biggest and largest oil producer in the world. Under the Biden administration, the United States produced more oil in one year than any country ever has in history. Meanwhile, we lock up our country on some futile naive mission to change the temperature of the globe, and we make all Australians angry, vulnerable, frustrated and anxious that they now have to pay more than $2 a litre at the pump.