Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

I make the point that we are living through a period of very low ambition for our country, and I feel really sorry for the people we are sent here to serve, because this government has left the nation totally unprepared for this current challenge. And it's not as if this is a new thing. It is not as if we haven't had supply chain challenges in the last five years. People with some reasonable sense of a memory will recall the COVID-19 pandemic. So here we sit, at the bottom end of the South Pacific, at the end of the supply chain, which has been designed to work on a just-in-time basis, totally exposed, completely weak and unable to respond in a way that is befitting of such a strong nation, a nation that should be prosperous nation.

I've asked myself, where did this all go wrong? I think there has been way too much ideology in the energy debate over the years, and my views haven't changed, other than to the point that I do think that we fundamentally have to be honest with the Australian people that we need more of everything. We are going to need more fossil fuels. We're going to need more renewables. Unfortunately, I think we have a situation where different people in different political parties have decided that there's a particular form of energy purity that they like to talk about to the exclusion of all others, like there's some energy that's good and some energy that's bad. Well, the truth is that we are endowed with all these resources—whether it be uranium, whether it be sunshine, whether it be wind, whether it be coal, whether it be gas or whether it be oil. We have 40 years of oil in the ground in this country and we can't get it out because of the environmental laws. That tells you that we're making a very big mistake. The idea that we are not going to use our own resources for our own benefit, while almost every other country continues to use our resources—either we export resources to them or they dig them up themselves—is just insane. It's unfair on our people. It is the most vulnerable people who won't be able to afford fuel because of the unusual ideological bent that has permeated our energy policy.

I make the point that Minister Watt has declared himself king of the environment and that he has fixed the environment laws. My sense is that he is not a very good king of the environment, because I don't think we're going to be able to get any resources in Australia in a timely fashion. The fact that it took seven or eight years to get the Browse and the Woodside developments going in the North West Shelf Project—God knows how many others gave up in that process—is a very bad sign.

The test, going forward, is: how can we get a more reasonable public debate going on in this country? We are going to need to use more fossil fuels. We're going to need to use more renewables. We're going to need more of everything. It would be insane to not use the things that we have, here in this country, while everyone else uses similar energy sources. We can't punish people; we can't punish Australians for being Australian. That's what I feel like we have been doing, certainly given the lack of preparedness the government has shown in the last few weeks. At the end of the day, yes, there are tactical judgments the government has made to respond—too slow, I'd say—but these are ultimately short-term measures.

The bigger question is: are we going to have the long-term energy abundance that we need to maintain our First World status economy? I'd say that it's very uncertain because one of the biggest drags on getting the energy resources approved and up to scratch has been these environmental laws. Given the Senate's extensive investigation of these bills, I would say, almost definitively, that there won't be any improvements under these laws, because all of the principal things, in the main, are in the regulations. So I don't think we're going to get fast approvals anytime soon. That's bad because we need more energy and more fuel right now.