Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The lack of organisation and response by this Labor government has been silent and insidious, and supported in many cases by both the Greens party and many of the crossbenchers. They have done it under the cloak of pretending to take action, and I'll give you a couple of examples. The first one was in government. We were still trying to release offshore tenure and acreage for things like the Great Australian Bight for more drilling for oil, to support Australia's refineries, and more drilling for additional gas, and, of course, the project that we had approved under NAIF, which was the Perdaman urea project at Karratha. These were the sorts of actions that we were taking.

Let me outline to you what has happened in the last four years since Labor have been in government. They have released no new offshore acreage—except for some very deep acreage, which then has the additional condition of no seismic testing, which means wildcat drilling, and drill holes that cost around $100 million each, so I'm not sure how many projects are going to take up that offer. They have encouraged activist organisations like the Environmental Defenders Office, and they've done that through funding them. Those activists have undermined every single new project for new gas; they're certainly not for new oil.

Even important projects like Perdaman have not been safe from the activists' greedy claws, with support from many of the crossbenchers trying to run arguments that somehow the development of this important urea project at Karratha would damage the environment, despite environmental approvals and others in place and this being in the national interest. The point has been made so clearly that the over two million tonnes of urea that will be manufactured at that site annually from 2027 would, in large part, cover Australia's domestic requirements. That is the sort of forward planning that the coalition was doing, but, under Labor, projects like the urea project have been delayed through activist lawfare, and offshore drilling for important oil projects to support refineries right here in Australia has been made so difficult.

The latest example is the changes to the EPBC legislation. There is nobody in their right mind that thinks that the new standards are going to in any way speed up, facilitate or provide greater clarity for decision-making in approvals. Indeed, it will be exactly the opposite. We will see duplication of consultation requirements for Aboriginal consultation. We have seen crazy outcomes like the 15-year vegetation management law to apply to all bioregions across Australia. We have seen no clarity on things like net gain. This is the sort of legislation that you introduce that pretends to be in Australia's national interests but actually will just see slow approvals or no approvals.

What Australians are now facing is the uncertainty driven by this conflict in the Middle East. It has brought into sharp relief the failure of this Labor government to actually progress anything new. Instead, they are taking credit for projects that were started under the coalition, and quietly killing off any of the other tenures that we had left in place in the May 2022 election.

We should be afraid. We've got two refineries left because of the subsidies and incentives left in place by the coalition. What about the crazy fuel standards introduced by Labor which mean that the Lytton refinery is forced to export the fuel that it refines because it doesn't meet Labor's new crazy standards? What about the safeguard mechanism that is our taxing energy producers out of existence? Australia is in a bad way under Labor. We will restore standards— (Time expired)