Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about the Fair Work Amendment (Fairer Fuel) Bill 2026. At its core, this bill appears to be an effort to fast-track a process to deal with emergency fuel related pressure in the road transport sector. In plain English, this appears to be an effort to get relief through the chain faster when we're dealing with fuel price surges and when truckies are getting smashed—and we acknowledge that; truckies are getting smashed. There is real merit in this because, when fuel costs explode overnight, the owner-driver and the small operator are often the ones who get crushed first. They cannot absorb endless cost increases. They cannot run at a loss forever. If they park the truck, the whole country feels it: freight stops, shelves are empty and the cost of living goes up again, which then flows through in higher inflationary pressures and mortgages. It's terrible for the entire economy.

I acknowledge that, plainly, in what is a genuine crisis, a genuine emergency that One Nation has been calling out for nearly a month now—we were the first to raise it—this fuel crisis that we are dealing with is going to have severe consequences through the entire chain. We have to acknowledge that, in a genuine emergency, government cannot just stand there and do nothing—which was what was happening. If there is a way to keep the truckies on the road, to help small operators survive and to help stop the entire burden being dumped on one of the weaker links in the chain, that has value.

But let us be honest about what this bill is and what this bill is not. This is not a fuel security bill. It doesn't create more fuel, it doesn't build more storage, it doesn't reopen refineries, it does not increase domestic extraction and it does not prepare Australia properly for future international supply shock. It is a short-term mechanism to shuffle costs and responsibilities inside the freight system after the crisis has already arrived—a crisis that we were grossly unprepared for because of long-term failures from this government and past governments. So, yes, whether there's merit here—we're not going to deny that; there is merit, and we believe it's important to help truckies stay on the road. But we're seeing and dealing with a reminder as to how badly this government failed to prepare this nation in the first place. That is why we are being forced into these urgent fixes—because we are completely exposed due to long-term failure by government.

This crisis did not come out of nowhere. We knew that, in the event of global conflict, our supply chains were exposed and Australia was exposed because Labor, and coalition governments in the past, have left this country weak, dependent and unprepared. For years, One Nation has warned that Australia's fuel security was fragile. We have known we were too reliant on imported fuel; we have said so for years and years. We have known our onshore storage is not good enough. We have known our domestic refinery capacity has declined, and we know that Australia would be in trouble if global shipping routes were hit or the world market seized up—which is why, for years, One Nation has been arguing that we need to do more to improve our onshore storage. We need to do more to increase our resiliency as a nation so we're not so dependent on these foreign supply chains. Yet instead of treating fuel security as a matter of national resilience and sovereignty, over the last couple of years since getting into government Labor has drifted along and hoped for the best.

I very clearly remember, actually, Labor being much more strident on this issue in 2019, I believe. I remember Bill Shorten talking about this and warning about this like One Nation was, something that Labor then failed to act on once they got into government. A serious government would have actually acted to build a strategic resilience. A serious government would have increased onshore fuel storage. A serious government would have fought harder to keep and strengthen domestic refining. A serious government would have backed more domestic extraction and made sure Australia had the capacity to stand on its own two feet in a crisis. A serious government would have seen fuel not just as a commodity but as the lifeblood of the economy—of freight, of farming, of emergency services and of everyday Australian life.

Instead, what have we seen from this government? We have seen an obsession with net zero ideology, a dogma. We have seen governments obsessed with emissions targets—applause from international agencies and things like that—and green symbolism, while the hard, practical foundations of an economy that is strong, resilient and reliant were completely neglected. Net zero is not just some abstract environmental target; it is a mindset of this government, and it tells politicians that they must dissuade, discourage and destroy traditional energy markets and traditional energy sources. Instead of making those long-term investments in our fuel extraction capacity and our fuel refining capacity, they punish those industries. They punish those dependable industries that we've relied on for so many years and pretend that a slogan—net zero—is a substitute for national capability. It creates policy uncertainty, it drives away investment from those industries, and it makes government less willing to back oil and gas refining and the infrastructure that actually keeps our economy moving.

You know how we know it keeps the economy moving? When we see it disappear, we're suddenly in a crisis. That is why Australia, under Labor, has become weaker, not stronger. We cannot run a country by wishfully thinking that everything's going to be okay. We clearly cannot run a country on industrial wind and solar out in rural and regional areas. You cannot move freight on solar panels. You cannot stock supermarket shelves with wind turbines. What we're seeing now—this failure to prepare and to ensure that we're resilient—is going to flow along the supply chain into our supermarkets and, ultimately, onto the kitchen table. Families are going to have to deal with higher costs. Small businesses and truckies are going to face serious difficulties with their industry.

While we're happy to support these measures to provide relief, let's be clear about why we're having to deal with these urgent measures in the first place. It's because of long-term failure by this Labor government and Liberal governments. That's why this bill is so revealing—because the government is now turning to a workplace regulation, an emergency Fair Work process, because it failed to do the bigger job earlier. It failed to manage this pain after the fact because we did not build resilience before the fact. This goes beyond this crisis. Net zero more broadly is making Australia more expensive and less secure. It has fed into higher energy costs, it has undermined confidence in dependable supply, it has weakened the productive side of the economy, and it has made us more vulnerable to shocks. Australians are paying for that, truckies are paying for that, farmers are paying for that and families are paying for that at the checkout.

This should be a wake-up call, because, as serious as this disruption is, it is still a drop in the ocean compared to what we may face in the future and what we may face if China follows through on its threats to move on Taiwan. This is the point we should be making very clearly. If a disruption like what we are seeing now can shake confidence, push up fuel prices and pressure our freight industry, imagine what a conflict with Taiwan would mean with how exposed we are to China's economy. The shock to shipping routes, trade, fuel availability, supply chains, supermarkets, farming imports, manufacturing imports and everyday household goods would be on a completely different, infinitely worse scale. That is what we should also be looking to prepare for.

If you think that this crisis is affecting your industry now, the crisis that we are failing to prepare for and should be preparing for—and it looks like the Labor government is again wishfully thinking and hoping that this crisis will not occur, but we know one thing that we can be very clear about is that, in the future, conflict will arise overseas. If we're not ready, if we can't stand on our own two feet, then we'll be back here in a few years time with more bandaid fixes. Fuel security is not optional. Domestic refining is not optional. Onshore storage is not optional. Domestic extraction is not optional. Strategic preparedness is not optional. We need to be acting on these things now, and we must be doing so with more urgency than this government is showing and past governments have failed to show.

There is another part of this crisis that again the Labor Party doesn't want to talk about: their mass migration agenda. Another thing it has to accept is that, when you bring in record of numbers of people into this country year after year without matching infrastructure, housing, energy and national capacity, while at the same time destroying our capacity to refine or extract our own fuel, you're going to have more demand. Without doing what is needed in order to make sure the system can handle it, you're going to have more demand for goods, more demand for freight, more demand for diesel powered transport, more demand for road, warehouses, logistics and supply chains. There will be more pressure on the whole system.

That also matters in a fuel crisis. If you already have a stretched country, stretched infrastructure, stretched housing and stretched energy supply, then any shock hits harder. That's exactly what Labor's mass migration agenda has done. It takes an already strained system and places even more demand on it, so when fuel costs spike or supplies are disrupted the consequences are worse because the baseline pressure was already high.

This is not about blaming individual migrants; it's about blaming Labor's failure to manage the system properly. It's about this government using mass migration as an economic crutch while refusing to build the infrastructure and productive capacity needed to support it. It's about this government chasing headline CPI growth, desperately attempting to patch over the cracks in the economy that their failure to invest in our capacity has caused. When a crisis occurs we are already under strain, we are already stretched, and that shock wave—that damage—flows on through.

They're saying we need to make sure that the fuel gets out of the city into the regions where we need it. One of the reasons our cities have such a need for fuel is that the population has been artificially boosted by a government obsessed with mass migration. In the end, their mass migration agenda has made this country more congested, more expensive, and made it harder for us to absorb shocks. It drives demand faster than supply can keep up with. It feeds the housing shortage, pushes up rents, pushes up wages in some sectors, overloads infrastructure and increases dependence on complex, fragile supply chains just to maintain normal life. That is why this issue cannot be looked in isolation.

The fuel crisis is not happening in a vacuum. It is hitting a country already under pressure from population growth well beyond what our system can comfortably absorb. If you have more people, you need more freight: more food moved, more goods moved, more construction material moved, more fuel consumed, more pressure on trucking, more wear on infrastructure and more exposure when things go wrong. And when things do go wrong—which they clearly have, because we are now in a crisis that this government is scrambling to deal with—who pays? It's the everyday Australians: the people paying the rent, the people buying groceries, the truckies and smaller owner-operators filling their tanks trying to keep their businesses alive—the family businesses that do not have the luxury of passing on every cost that comes down the line.

That is why mass migration is also part of this same pattern of failure, just like net zero. In practice, it often means more pressure on the nation, less resilience and a lower quality of life for the people already here. A government serious about our nation's sovereign capacity would be looking to dramatically slow the mass migration to a level we can sustain, because we can't sustain what is going on right now. A serious and sensible government would put Australians first in housing, infrastructure and economic planning. It would stop using population growth as a substitute for productivity and national strength. It would understand that resilience matters. Our capacity to stand on our own two feet matters.

Yes, a fuel crisis is about energy and freight. But it also sits inside a bigger story—a story of a government that has loaded more and more pressure onto the country while doing less and less to make the country capable of handling it. That is what they have done with their mass migration agenda. It has amplified strain across the board and makes this crisis and every crisis of a similar nature more painful and more difficult than it needs to be.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us in a position where we can say two things at once and both things are true. First, in the middle of the genuine crisis we we're in we cannot ignore the immediate reality facing truckies and small business owner-operators. If they go under, the country suffers. If they park the truck, supply chains seize up. If this bill helps us get some relief through the system faster and helps keep some truckies on the road, then that is a real benefit, and we acknowledge that. But, second, we should never confuse emergency damage control with serious national leadership, which is what we are lacking. This bill is not a fuel security strategy. It's not a plan for more sovereignty or a plan for resilience. It is a quick slap patch after a failure.

While One Nation acknowledges the merit of acting and the need to help truckies survive the immediate shock, we say clearly that Australians deserve much better than emergency patches and after-the-fact fixes. We need fuel security. We need more domestic capacity. We need a practical government that sees the danger we're in and the crises that are coming down the line. Australia needs to put our national resilience ahead of an obsession with net zero and mass migration. That is the real lesson here. Until governments face the truth, our country will keep lurching from one avoidable crisis to the next. Unless we take steps to stand on our own two feet as a nation, we will be back here in a few years time having the exact same argument. (Time expired)