Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Six—thank you very much—and I'm pretty sure energy minister was one of them, too. And you were part of the Liberal-National government that walked away from our sovereign fuel capacity. You were sitting beside Australia's other worst energy minister, the member for Hume, Angus Taylor, when he drove this country into the ground. He hollowed out our domestic fuel supply, he closed our refineries, he made Australia dangerously dependent on global supply chains, he abandoned our sovereign fuel capacity, and he allowed national fuel reserves to fall to alarming new lows.

You left the future of Australia's refining industry hanging by a thread. In fact, only two of Australia's refineries are left, in Brisbane and in Geelong, and they are producing around 20 per cent of this country's fuel needs. Those refineries only survived thanks to the Australian Workers' Union standing shoulder to shoulder with the refinery workers, saving those refineries from closure. The AWU and this side of politics have always campaigned to secure a future where Australia retains the industrial muscle it needs at uncertain times. We saved the Mount Isa smelter and we saved the Boyne smelter, and coalition senators in this chamber mocked us this week.

If you assumed that the opposition might have learnt something after their decade of damage, you'd be wrong. Instead, Angus Taylor and opposition Treasury spokesperson Tim Nicholls today announced that they want to cut $2.6 billion from the budget—more Liberal Party cuts, cuts, cuts. They want to kill off the very things that are making energy more affordable in this country and making us less reliant on overseas fuel capacity.