Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

Outside of here, in the real world where real people live, outside this place, ports are telling us right now that trade could grind to a halt. Apprentices—young people who have been going to work—have been stood down from their jobs. Primary producers, including vegetable growers, are reducing production as they consider if they can even get to their crops or their animals. Can they even get that produce and their commodities to market without going broke? These are decisions of real people—real people like rural doctors, who are having meetings about how they're going to get to their patients and how many may be untreated.

It is this government that's allowed this fuel crisis to escalate to the point where it is now disrupting trade, jobs, fuel supply, health services and frontline operations right across Australia. The reality is that Minister Bowen is a part-time energy minister in what is a national crisis. He is asleep at the wheel. This government is outsourcing responsibility right now to a fuel coordinator, instead of being fully focused on fixing the problem. I would have thought that the only thing that each and every one of the government ministers—these government ministers across here—would be doing right now is working out how each Australian is going to be affected in every portfolio, in every electorate, by this mess. It's impacting aged care, agriculture, Indigenous Australians in remote communities, volunteers who do incredible work in our communities, the transport industry and every type of small business.

This government has a problem not only with finding solutions but also with communicating what it is doing to the Australian public. It is the government itself that has fuelled confusion and anxiety, not right-wing extremists, as they claim. My colleagues and I have been raising this for weeks, demanding attention to this obvious risk. Demanding answers in this place does not make us—or me—right-wing extremists.

This government has sought to cover up its incompetence by seeking to blame everyone else. One of the reasons it's doing this is that it hasn't found a solution. It's hard to believe that, with all the resources at its disposal, all the intelligence it's got at hand and the fact that it's been in charge for four years, it still seeks to blame everybody else. It should be unbelievable, but it's actually true. And now it's failing to tell the Australian people how it will work its way through this. It's still 'looking at the levers', we just heard. Well, we want you to pull them. Sure, there is conflict in the Middle East, blocking a supply route, but the economy was already in trouble. This has just made a bad situation much worse. Remember, just a few weeks ago, you were pretending there were no supply issues, even though people, including me, were pulling up to bowsers that said, 'Not in use.' That should tell you that there's a supply issue.

Now the government is telling us to work from home. In fact, the International Energy Agency, which was here only this week, has a list of recommendations: work from home, reduce highway speed limits, encourage public transport, get a carpool, use an EV, divert LPG, avoid air travel, and switch to other modern cooking solutions. But do you know what should have been the No. 1 recommendation, when they spoke this week in this very place? This Labor government needs to get on with it and stop blaming everyone else.