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

But we are at the bottom end of the supply chain, in many respects. So this has exposed vulnerabilities, and it has exposed the failure, on the supply side, to actually get enough resources into the market to ensure that Australians can avail themselves of reasonably priced resources to fuel their cars, and farmers can fuel their crops and businesses can maintain their actual function.

Now, we have the resources in this country. We've done a very bad job of mining them—and I make that point across the board. I mean, we should have had more oil and more gas; we should have had more uranium; we should have had more renewables. We should have more of everything. It's a massive supply-side challenge, in a country that is endowed with extraordinary potential. Renewables, fossil fuels—who cares? I mean, I don't think it really matters.

Right now, people are living in what the psychologist Maslow talked about—his hierarchy. People just want to put petrol in their car at a reasonable price so that they can get to work. Industry wants to be able to maintain its function, which it cannot do unless it gets access to reasonably priced diesel—or gets access to diesel in any respect.

So my point is that this has been a considerable supply-side failure. The red tape, the regulation—all the garbage that Canberra has done—and the tax burden have meant that it has been uneconomic, or not possible, to develop the resources that are underneath our feet, here in Australia, or, indeed, in the sky.

The same issue applies to the housing debate, which I note has been part of a lot of the contributions tonight. It's the same problem. It's a supply-side failure—a massive supply-side failure.

Again, the Abundance book actually documents how bad all these different regulations were, in the United States, in holding back the development of housing. This government has made all the mistakes that were made in California and other jurisdictions, about which politicians have said lovely, warm, fuzzy things, but which massively fail when it comes to actually delivering things.

What the Australian people want their politicians to do is to get them access to reasonably priced housing and resources, so they can have their lives, do their jobs, have a family—whatever. Who gives a rat's? It doesn't really matter. But the foundational components of this debate have been completely lost when people go to these kneejerk ideas like, 'Let's put more taxes onto housing,' or, 'Let's put more taxes onto resources.' I mean, it's insane. More taxes will result in fewer things happening, because we live in a competitive world where other countries also have resources and opportunities to do things. And the fact is that one of the reasons we don't have many houses being built in Australia is that people can't make any money out of it. It's uneconomic to build. So people who have resources have decided: 'Well, I'm not going to build houses. I can't make any money out of that. So I'll do something else.' This is how the market works.

We have had massive supply-side failures under this government. They have been there for four long years. They have cooked housing. They have cooked the ability for us to respond to this crisis in the Middle East, because we have no resources of our own. We're importing oil. We have heaps: we have 40 years of oil in Australia, that we could have had, right now—40 years of it. We could have had more renewables. We could have had more power. We're going to need more power, more stuff and more houses, and we won't get any of that, under this government, because they don't seem to know what they're doing. They say they've read the book, but I think they're actually telling a big whopper.