Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

The motion before the chamber, moved by Senator McKenzie, is a good one for the chamber to now turn its mind to, because I think Australians would rightly expect that their government would be doing everything it could to ensure that there were reasonable supplies of fuel for industry, households and businesses at this juncture. But you can't take this current debate about the government's failure to manage the fuel shortage out of the broader context in which it sits, and that is that I think that the Australian public have worked out the Prime Minister. He's not a very competent fellow.

But there's another fellow who sits alongside him, called the Treasurer, and he was going around last year saying that he'd read this book called Abundance. It's a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, a couple of people from America, and their central thesis was that there was too much red tape and there wasn't enough supply, supply of everything: supply of energy, supply of housing—whatever. The good doc—he calls himself Dr Chalmers—said it was 'a ripper' and that it was 'doing the rounds' around the caucus. I suspect that, if he'd uttered that statement in the parliament, he could have misled the parliament, because there's no evidence that anyone in the Labor government has understood that central thesis of abundance: we need more energy, we need more gas, and we will need more condensate oil. These are the things, alongside all the other sources of energy, that are going to fuel the economy on an ongoing basis.

One of the troubling aspects of this whole debate is the failure of our environmental protection laws to facilitate reasonable development—whether it is the Browse development, the North West Shelf development or the Barossa development, where there has been gas and also condensate oil. These have taken seven or eight years to get going, and some of them will never get going. We are a country which is replete with resources. It should never have come to this point where we are relying on unreliable supply chains. The judgement of whether or not a refinery is open or closed is quite separate from whether or not the country has done everything it can to make the most of its resources and to make the most of its opportunities.

I think it's very clear that, after four long years of Labor, they have let these environmental approvals completely undermine the development of new resources. That is very clear. The government would say, apart from it being misleading in relation to understanding the truth about abundance, that it has passed environmental laws and has fixed the EPBC laws. These EPBC laws give the Commonwealth a planning control, which has held back these resource developments that would've been needed today. They would've given us more petroleum. They say they've passed laws, but the detail of those laws is in the regulations. The matters of national significance, which are at the heart of the seven- to eight-year delays in relation to the development of gas and condensate oil, are yet to be determined, so it is unsurprising, perhaps, that we sit here at this four-year mark of this government, look at their record and see that, in relation to the environmental approvals, there is no improvement.

The details are in the regs, and, because Minister Watt has given himself godlike powers, he will effectively determine what these rules look like. It won't be the parliament deciding what the matters of national significance will be in detail, and it's the detail that matters here. It will be one minister. So we'll have more delay, more uncertainty and fewer approvals of essential resources developments. That's the point here: Australia should've had more gas and more oil—more everything—right now. We haven't had it, because of these environmental approvals, which are not right. The balance is not right. Of course we want to protect the environment, but we've got to get the supply out there. We haven't had that, and we've got no real certainty that we'll get it under this government.