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

That's a description of what the bill does. I can read the documents for that. It doesn't really answer the question of why the government hasn't considered jettisoning all of this green rubbish they've inserted into legislation because they felt under pressure from the Greens. Minister, I think you've got more flexibility than you realise. There's a poll there that came out on Sunday which found that now, amazingly, 40 per cent of Greens voters support drilling for oil and gas right now. If the law of averages holds, that means that, of the ten Greens senators down there, four of them probably support drilling for oil and gas now. If they only came and joined us all, we would not have a problem. Liquid gold would be flowing like a river.

I'm not sure why the government is reluctant now to jettison—I can see why, in the last few years, in the current climate, there's been this well-funded—often, overseas funded—activist campaign to denigrate the great Australian resources industry. I've tried to stand up against that. I haven't buckled to this pressure, but you have. The Labor Party did. But you don't need to anymore, because the Australian people can see the common sense of needing to drill for oil and gas. We cannot be so dependent, relying on other countries.

There was a great report released just the other day by the Page Research Centre, which is the National Party's think tank. This stat just blows my mind. I hadn't seen it before, but it checks out. A full 50 per cent of the imports to this nation by weight are liquid fuels. Half of our nation's imports by volume are liquid fuels, and another 10 per cent by weight are petrochemicals, so 60-odd per cent of the imports to our nation by weight come from petrochemicals. That is clearly a massive energy security vulnerability and national security vulnerability for our country because any nation that would seek to do us harm has got the Achilles heel right there.

This is no secret. This is all publicly available data. Anyone can work this out. We just haven't thought about hard enough, really—and I haven't either. I just couldn't believe this. I hadn't seen it before. All they'd need to do is cut those shipping lanes. We would really struggle, obviously, to defend so many ships coming to our nation, and we'd be brought to our knees—just as we are right now. It clearly is a massive security priority for Australia to reduce our dependence on liquid fuels. The government's line to date has been: 'Well, the refineries closed on your watch. We don't have the 90 days of stockpiles.' But that almost begs the question: if we did have the refineries—and let's get it right. Angus Taylor saved the last two refineries. They were going to shut, but we supported them to stay open.

Even if we had kept the other four open, we'd be in the same boat, because we would rely more on imports of crude oil to fuel those refineries. We're literally in the same boat—excuse the pun. We still need the boats to arrive to keep those refineries moving, and what's happening right now? The boats aren't arriving. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. We'd have exactly the same vulnerability even if we had the six refineries going. Clearly—and this is what this report plays out and concludes so succinctly and clearly—the problem is that we don't produce the raw feedstock. That's what we need to reduce our vulnerability. Unless we can have an oil industry from go to whoa—from rig to petrol pump—and have that supply chain here domestically, we remain vulnerable. Our Achilles heel that an adversary can target remains.

The problem has been that we haven't explored enough oil and gas. We have, under this government in particular, demonised and prohibited any kind of support for this industry. My question to the government here is: do these changes allow EFA to invest in domestic oil production, be it conventional—or unconventional—drilling for oil and gas or some other technologies like coal to liquids. This report really plays that out. South Africa gets 40 per cent of its liquid fuels from coal to liquids. China's burning 400 million tonnes of coal a year to make liquid fuels. We can do this. We've got enormous coal reserves. Do these legislative changes allow EFA to invest in those kinds of technologies, which would fundamentally change our energy security and reduce our vulnerability of relying on other countries?