Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've got to comment now on the hypocrisy of the Greens. Senator Waters is saying, 'Bring our troops home.' Let me tell you: there's only one E-7A Wedgetail with a crew of 85 that are over there in the UAE, not in Iran, and that's to stop and to detect drone attacks for those 25,000 Australians that are over there. What a bunch of hypocrites they are, saying we are actually involved in the war. They say, 'Pick up the phone to Trump. You've got to stop this war,' as if the United States is going to listen to us, as if we've got this wonderful relationship with America, as if they're going to listen to what we have to say. They're blowing this completely out of proportion for the people who are watching this, as if we've got boatloads of troops going over there. This is the hypocrisy of the Greens about the situation that we are in now.

One Nation continues to set the agenda in this parliament and this country. While the major parties keep on claiming One Nation has no policies, they keep on copying them or adopting them. This happened a number of times during last year's federal election campaign. Labor has taken almost a year to implement One Nation's 2025 election policy to halve the fuel excise. Just as we did at the election, we advocated this policy as a measure to reduce the cost of living that has soared under this Labor government. It has taken a crisis exposing Australia's fuel insecurity for Labor to finally act. Obviously, they haven't been keeping up with us, because we've since upgraded that demand to a 100 per cent cut for three months. We advocate this policy, which would provide twice as much relief to motorists, farmers, miners and the transport industry as Labor's does.

However, our primary goal now is to heed the warning of this crisis and advocate a sovereign fuel industry. The conflict with the Iranian regime has exposed Australia. It has exposed how vulnerable we are to global economic shocks, even one caused by a conflict taking place more than 12,000 kilometres away from this building. It has exposed the failure of successive Labor and coalition governments to protect Australia from such shocks, despite many warnings over the years. They were warned to increase our onshore fuel reserves. They were warned to ensure we had a minimum of 90 days worth of fuel supplies. For decades, they've been warned to ensure Australia had the ability and capacity to be self-sufficient in critical areas like fuel production.

Australia is incredibly rich in energy and mineral resources. We have everything we need to be self-sufficient. Over the decades, the enormous economic potential of this abundance has been squandered. Australians should be the richest people in the world. We should have the highest standard of living in the world. We should be self-sufficient in virtually everything, with a huge manufacturing sector. We should have a powerful military, a world-leading economy and advanced technologies and research. We should have influence across the globe that matches such national strength.

What do we have instead? We have a weak military, a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, a fuel crisis, a trillion-dollar federal debt and the profound economic self-harm that is net zero. We have the highest electricity prices in the world outside of Europe when we should have among the lowest thanks to an abundance of coal. We are facing shortages of natural gas, despite having some of the largest reserves in the world.

At this point, I have to call out the Greens and their economic incompetence. I'm calling out their obsession with renewables and their demonisation of the fossil fuels that provide nearly all of our energy requirements. If they think they can run this country on just renewables, it's an absolute joke. They've proposed a huge new tax on gas, not to ensure we get a fair share of revenue but to shut down the industry altogether. They're completely silent about the environmental destruction caused by the renewables rollout. They're happy to destroy the environment in their crusade to save it! This just doesn't make sense.

We have all the resources we need to establish a sovereign fuel industry which meets domestic demand. There are more than 17 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars locked up in shale. The United States have developed a shale-oil industry worth many billions of dollars per year. We need to wake up to ourselves.