Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Finally, colleagues, the Labor Party has realised that oil, diesel and petrol are strategic commodities. What the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Amendment (Strategic Reserve) Bill 2026 does—what the Labor Party are doing at the last minute as we enter perhaps the worst energy crisis since the 1970s—is finally, belatedly recognise we need fossil fuels to keep our country moving. It's taken them awhile; they have, for their first four years in government, run a war on fossil fuels, and that war, which they have won some battles at, I must say, has meant Australia is entering this energy crisis in a much more vulnerable state than we should otherwise , because the Labor Party just don't like fossil fuels. They don't like oil. They don't like petrol. They don't like diesel. And now they expect us—they expect the Australian people—to trust them to deal with a major oil shortage.

I welcome this bill. I welcome the belated recognition of the importance of fossil fuels. I've been trying to scream this from the rooftops for my whole political career, because the basic facts are things don't get done in our economy unless we have a balanced mix of energy sources, and that does and must include the application of liquid fuels, because liquid fuels are what moves the trucks. They are what helps our tractors plant our food, what keeps our major export industries going and what helps transport the things we in this country need to import from overseas. Without them, our country stops. Without them, people will suffer. There's no doubt about that.

What the bill does, as I was hinting at, is establish strategic reserves or a list of strategic commodities that can be added to a strategic reserve. The government has used this as a backdoor to establish a strategic critical minerals reserve; I'll give them that. There is the ability to add other materials, I note, including, as the government has flagged, fertiliser and PVC, which are also things that are made from petrochemical products, from these so-called evil fossil fuels that help feed us and help house us. We do very much need them.

Surprisingly, the government has not put solar panels or wind turbines on the strategic reserve lists. I thought we had been told for years that all we had to do was capture our sun and our wind and everything would be rosy. Again, we're getting a lesson from the school of hard knocks that the fairytales the government have told our country have turned out to be that very thing.

So welcome back to the Labor Party. Welcome back to the land of common sense and the planet called Earth. It's just a little bit late, and I do think there are still shortcomings with this approach, which, unfortunately, may cause issues for us in the future. As I say, we will happily guide the Labor Party back to planet Earth. We've been here. We never left, so we know the way around here, and we'll help them get this bill through the Senate at the last minute. But, in doing so, I want to flag that we will move some amendments that would, once and for all, see Labor's war on fossil fuels end. If the Labor Party doesn't support these very reasonable amendments, we will see that their last-minute conversion to these issues is fake one. It's not real. They are just trying to manage themselves from one political crisis to another, not to really solve the issues ahead of our nation.

One of our amendments will, very simply, get rid of the damage the Labor Party did just a year ago. Right here tonight they're saying: 'Oh, we love fossil fuels. We want to bring these ships in. We want to ensure them.' You'll hear them speak about that tonight. But just a year ago the Labor Party changed the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Act to ban Efic from supporting coal, oil and gas. That is in section 23C of the act. We'll move an amendment to remove that.

If the Labor Party is serious about solving this oil crisis they will support us in removing the very damage that they did just last year. We know what the Labor Party did last summer. We know that last summer the Labor Party sought to kill our coal, oil and gas industry. So it's a bit rich for them to come in here tonight and say that somehow they now support it.

Finally, we'll give the Labor Party the opportunity to unwind the dodgy deal they did with the Greens just four months ago. Just four months ago the Labor Party moved an amendment to the EPBC Act, to environmental laws, to exclude the ability of the environment minister to approve a project if it involves fossil fuels. Amazingly—absurdly—we're about to go into the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, we're about to leave this place for five weeks and the government, thanks to its deal with the Greens, has no ability to approve a project that might help us bring more oil online, because they have excluded the ability for that to be in the national interest. Surely it is in our national interest to approve a project that underpins our liquid fuel security in this country. (Time expired)