Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

After that extraordinary contribution, which is seeking to set one Australian against another in the way we've just come to expect from those opposite, I want to put on the record a little bit of the Liberal legacy and the situation that they got us into. Angus Taylor, now the star leader of the Liberal-National coalition, put Australia's fuel reserves in Texas, and he watched domestic gas prices go up and up. These are not the guys you want in control right now. They were also in government when they saw four of the six petroleum refineries closed, and two of the four that went down went down while Angus Taylor was the minister for energy. Let's be clear: the answers to the challenges that Australia faces right now are not coming from Mr Angus Taylor and his team.

So what is the reality? Australians have, delightfully, lived in peace for a very, very long time. We've not seen the impacts of war hit us ever before in the life experience of so many Australians. That is the reality we face. Right now, in this piece of land that nobody ever knew about—or many Australians wouldn't have known about—until just recently, called the Strait of Hormuz, there is a pinch point. There is a war that's happening in that region, and we are not getting the fuel that we were used to getting to the whole of the global economy. Everybody who made decisions to scale up their business, to advance their economic risk for reward, are all under the pump now because they could not foresee this in their business plans. They don't need whingeing and carping, which is what we're seeing from the other side here. They need a strategic plan, and they need the confidence that that plan is going to deliver them the fuel supplies that they need to continue to do their business and get through this incredible challenge that we're all facing.

In Australia, the fact is that everybody knows that there are fuels of all types that we rely on for our economy. We need to make sure that we have correct supply, we need to ensure that we have proper distribution of that and we also need to be mindful of the supply chain impacts that are a part of that whole ecosystem. We're also very mindful of fertiliser. But it's not just fertilisers, and it's not just the farm sector that is being impacted; it is everybody in heavy industries—people driving trucks, people picking up our garbage and people who advancing the nation by providing the infrastructure. I know that people talk about the Bruce Highway. Of course, we can't let that stop. We've got to manage fuel in to allow the continuation of housing building, PVC piping, proper infrastructure development, fertiliser and fuel. We know this.

Instead of sitting back and having a big old whinge, as we see from everybody on the other side, we're getting on with the job. Today was a very, very important day because the Prime Minister has activated a critical part of what we're doing, which is the National Fuel Security Plan. There are four phases. The first bit is 'plan and prepare'. We're pretty well through that now. We are now in 'keeping Australia moving'. That is what we have to do. Further down the track, if necessary, we'll take 'targeted action'. The fourth stage is 'protecting critical services for all Australians', including access to health care. Cities; peri-urban areas, where I live, on the edge of a city; regional and rural—every Australian is in it together with this government. We are not going to set one Australian against another. Nothing good comes of breaking us apart. We're all in this together. We can do the heavy lifting, as a government, with the support of great Australians, to make sure our National Fuel Security Plan is properly enacted and that we get the supplies in that we need to keep Australia moving.