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

It is the responsibility of every federal government to carefully and soberly steward its nation through the best and the worst of times, and I think we can all agree that these are some of the worst of times. Australia is critically exposed to geopolitical risk unless we can reliably produce a domestic supply of liquid fuel.

Today, the Nationals think tank, the Page Research Centre, has warned of exactly this. In its groundbreaking new report, All at sea: fuel, war and Australia's Achilles heel, it has outlined a pathway to restoring Australia's self-sustainability, including incentivising domestic oil drilling, expanding fuel reserves as supply bridges, establishing a dedicated fuel security budget and approving coal-to-liquid pilot plants. This report confirms what we have long been warning: Australia must develop its own energy, including liquid fuel.

If you don't have fuel and you don't have food, you are pretty close to anarchy. You cannot use a carbon credit to fill up a fuel tank, and you certainly can't unlock any strategic reserves. In this mad pursuit of net zero, we have offshored our most important industries, forcing us to rely on unstable regions to meet our most basic needs—needs which we can fulfill from our own abundant resources. This report from the Page Research Centre shows we do have all the resources here, in Australia, to get us out of this mess. We just need more Australia. We must drill, baby, drill and unleash Australia's energy resources.

The report recommends expanding Australia's own petroleum supply, conventional and unconventional, and prioritise, incentivise and deregulate domestic exploration and drilling for crude oil, gas and unconventional petroleum in Australia. We must approve coal-to-liquids pilot plants so that Australia can test and scale one of the few domestic pathways capable of supplying the substantial share of national fuel and chemical demand. We must expand in-country fuel reserve as a bridge, not a substitute, with priority given to distributed storage. We must recapitalise and expand domestic refining capacity to meet Australia's diesel-heavy fuel needs, including hydrocracking capability able to process a wider range of imported and synthetic feedstocks. We need to support complementary fuel streams where they make strategic sense, including gas-to-liquids, biofuels and other alternative liquid fuel pathways. We must establish a dedicated fuel security budget, funded from a portion of fuel excise, a new dedicated excise or from the defence budget.

Labor's ill considered and economically damaging policies have had a very predictable outcome. They've included arbitrary mentions of a gas levy and the PRRT changes, a gas market intervention, overbearing EPBC changes and the brutalising safeguard mechanism. Australians will be left jobless and at the mercy of international energy supply if this keeps going. The Albanese government's continued policy failures in the resources and energy space have left businesses questioning if Australia is worth investing in while discouraging sovereignty of supply. Private capital has also attempted coal-to-liquid projects in Australia but has run into excessive green and red tape. We can create our own energy abundance with domestic production of liquid fuels, and, with the necessary steps to achieve it, it will have limited economic cost.

Australia deserves better. We must restore our standard of living and protect our way of life, and the coalition will commit to this through expanding offshore tenures, encouraging drilling and making sure we have our own domestic capability for fuel.