Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate will now consider the proposal, under standing order 75, from Senator McGrath, which has been circulated and is shown at item 14 of today's Order of Business:

The need for the Albanese Labor Government to outline how it will ensure fuel is delivered to Australians where it is needed and rule out heavy-handed mandates.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Albanese Labor Government to outline how it will ensure fuel is delivered to Australians where it is needed and rule out heavy-handed mandates.

We are in the middle of a fuel crisis. It's not being helped by a prime minister who is living in this self-induced bubble of Canberra and the world in which he likes to mix.

I don't think the Prime Minister or the members of the Labor Party who sit in the cabinet realise how tough people are doing it out there. We've got a cost-of-living crisis, and on top of the cost-of-living crisis we now have a fuel crisis, which is only adding to the pain that Australians are feeling when they pull out their purse or wallet and get their card out and do a swipe, or when they pay on their phone for items. Everything is costing more—and we all know the maxim 'Labor will always cost you more'—because of the Labor government. We note the government has announced a temporary cut to the fuel excise for three months—and that relief is welcome. I note that is something the coalition first called for, and it got pooh-poohed by the commentariat and also by some members of the Labor Party as not being needed—which just goes to show how out of touch this Labor government is.

What is surprising is that this fuel crisis should not have come as a surprise to the Labor government. Anyone with half a modicum of interest in world affairs would have known and seen that the United States and Israel have a particular interest in relation to the nuclear capability of Iran. Iran is in the middle of the Middle East, and the Middle East is famous for many, many good things, including oil. In particular, 20 per cent of the world's oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz. If a conflict were to kick off over there, it would obviously have an impact upon Australia. This government didn't do any of the planning in relation to that.

If you fail to plan, you effectively plan to fail. If the government were taking out diplomatic staff from the Middle East from certain countries five, six or seven weeks ago, why weren't they making similar plans in relation to ensuring we had fuel security in this country?

The issue goes to this. If you're in regional Queensland, if you're in regional Australia, your access to fuel under this government is quite limited because across the country hundreds of petrol stations remain dry. What this means is that farmers can't run their machinery. Their seeding plans are at risk. This is not just an economic issue; it's actually a security issue in terms of the security risk of the lack of fuel and in terms of food security for Australia. It is well known that Australia is a food bowl and that, with a population of 28 million, we can comfortably grow the food for three times our population. However, this is not going to be the case if farmers cannot plant the seeds. So supply chains are under real pressure.

Without fuel, parents can't get to school. At the Liberal National state council on the weekend, the feedback from state council delegates from around the state—

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

Very sound judgements made.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Very sound debates were going on; thank you, Senator Bragg. The debates were going on and the conversations were being had in relation to how the lack of diesel in regional Queensland was impacting everything from parents being able to get their children to school to people just getting on with their lives. The No. 1 job of any government is to keep Australians safe, and this government is not keeping Australians safe because it is not ensuring that Australians have adequate fuel supply, a fuel supply that is within the means of the average Australian, who is already combating a cost-of-living crisis.

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

Senator McGrath asks for an outline of what the government is doing to boost fuel security in this nation. He doesn't need a motion in the Senate; he just needs to read the newspaper. I appreciate he's had a few things on his mind lately, so I am happy to catch him up on what's been going on.

Yesterday, the Albanese government announced the fuel excise will be halved from 52.6 cents to 26.3 cents per litre. This will take effect from tomorrow, providing relief against peaks in demand for fuel for the next three months. Further, the heavy vehicle road user charge will be reduced to zero for the same three-month period, providing immediate financial relief to the freight industry to the tune of $2.55 billion, reducing operating costs by 32 cents per litre.

On top of this, yesterday we passed a bill to give the Fair Work Commission the power to hear urgent applications to protect truckies and trucking operators from peaks in fuel demand. And on Monday the Prime Minister convened National Cabinet, and a four-stage National Fuel Security Plan was adopted. This is a plan that was adopted by all states and territory premiers and chief ministers, including Senator McGrath's own Premier in Queensland, David Crisafulli.

We've also begun the release of 20 per cent of Australia's fuel reserves. We've changed petrol standards to get more fuel flowing. We've appointed a national Fuel Supply Taskforce Coordinator. We've tasked the ACCC to ramp up fuel price monitoring and to issue on-the-spot fines to dishonest operators, and more. This is the kind of action you can expect from a serious party of government, not the One Nation tribute band we've seen the Liberal Party turn into. Labor understands the importance of fuel to keeping Australia moving, especially in Australia's most decentralised state, Queensland. Queenslanders depend on reliable fuel supply, not only for cars and trucks but for freight that keeps our state moving. Fuel is what gets our farmers' products to market, keeps emergency services operating and keeps our remote communities connected.

So the concerns of Australians and Queenslanders around global fuel security are real, and this government takes them seriously. What we will not do is treat an urgency motion as a substitute for policy, as Senator McGrath is doing today, or as a reason to run out the tail end of a preselection pitch. What Senator McGrath is not telling the Australian people is that the fuel security issues we now face were a deliberate policy design when the Liberals left office. Senator McGrath, you were the assistant minister to Scott Morrison when you closed our oil refineries in this country. I can't remember how many secret ministries the bloke had. I think it was five, at last count.

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

Six.

Corinne Mulholland (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Link to 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.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's always interesting to hear from Senator McGrath and get yet another of the opposition's logical inconsistencies on the public record. On the one hand he calls out the Albanese Labor government to outline how it will ensure that fuel is delivered to Australians where it's needed. With that bit, absolutely, I agree. Then he goes on to call for the government to rule out heavy-handed mandates. I get the message, Senator McGrath. It's: do something, but, whatever you do, don't do anything. It's a totally confused message, and that's what we're getting consistently from those on the opposite side. We know why the LNP is sitting over there and why this government is on the Treasury benches. It's because we are a government that will responsibly, carefully and logically get things done. Australians know that the global circumstances that we're dealing with are really pressing hard on every single economy across the world and pressing hard on the delivery of the fuels that we have always expected would flow. There is an unprecedented conflict in the Middle East. It's absolutely pushing up prices everywhere around the world. Here, in Australia, that's putting pressure on families, on farmers and on small and large businesses. When you go to the servo to fill up and they're out of fuel, of course that can be really, really worrying, and that's why our government is hearing from Australians, accepting the reality and getting on with taking careful and necessary action calmly and methodically to get the fuel we need restocked as soon as possible, and when that fuel gets here, to get it to where it needs to go.

Now, despite a stable national fuel supply, we know that the global price pressure and the doubling of demand in some areas has seen parts of the regional fuel market—the spot market in particular—come under significant strain. It's had an unacceptable impact particularly on regional customers, who source their fuel this way as the most common way. This is especially affecting farmers. That's why we're working collaboratively and practically with the states and the territories to fix these supply chains and get the fuel where it needs to be. Now, we've undertaken this task carefully. We've introduced legislation that is really vital to making sure that we underwrite additional fuel cargoes and other vital strategic reserves that will help to acquire additional supply. We've got more fuel, and diesel in particular, into the Australian market by temporarily amending the fuel standards to help respond to the reality that Australians are facing. We've released 20 per cent of the baseline minimum stockholding obligation for petrol and diesel, which has further boosted fuel supply.

In New South Wales, my home state, we are working together with the state government to deal with the realities of significant additional demand. At Newcastle terminal, as one example, diesel sale volumes have been up to 36 per cent more than was forecast during March. The state government of New South Wales has announced it will require major fuel companies to provide information on their plans for supplying the additional fuel that's needed, particularly to regional communities, and the state government will establish a liquid fuel emergency operations centre to track any shortages, to coordinate fuel direction and to forecast future supply needs.

There's evidence that this minimum stockholding obligation release is already beginning to flow into regional communities. One company's sales to independent distributors that supply regional and rural areas is up to 33 per cent of the normal average monthly volume after only 25 days of sales. In the Central West and south-west of the state, an extra 1,200 kilolitres of diesel is flowing to agricultural and regional independent retail networks. There's an extra 400 kilolitres heading to the Dubbo region to fill bulk tanks. At a national level, the legislative changes that will be coming to this place in just a couple of hours, relating to the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Act, will bring the deal-making expertise of Export Finance Australia to the challenge to make sure we can enable the purchase of cargoes and support those companies to continue to address the supply shortages.

Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a significant problem that Australians are facing. The cost of fuel and the fuel shortages in our country have impacted Australians in a very big way, and this isn't an isolated impact. I think that, if we hadn't had the cost-of-living struggles in our country that we've had for the last four years, if we hadn't had the housing crisis in our country that we've had for the last four years and if we hadn't had the broader inflationary challenges in this country that we've had for the last four years, as well as the increase in interest rates and the increase in rents, maybe this would have been felt differently by Australians. But, on top of everything else that Australians are paying more for, this is just another punch in the guts.

I did the math on it before. The average price of diesel fuel in February was $1.82 a litre. The average price this week is $3.07 a litre. On a 60-litre tank, that's an increase from about $110 to about $185. That's an almost 70 per cent increase in a matter of weeks. I know those opposite will say that it's not their fault and that it is a global shock, and I acknowledge that that is the case. But the issue is that this is on top of all of the other homegrown shocks, and Australians have just had enough. They can't take it. This is yet another thing that they have to cop and that they have to deal with. Every time that they feel that they're getting one step ahead, they have to take two steps back.

It's particularly hard for young Australians who are struggling to start out. I've said it over and over, and I'm going to say it again. They believe, no matter how hard they work, they will never be able to own their own home. There's actually nothing there for them in that social contract. They're missing out across the board. That's a failure of the people in this place. We have to do better with that. We have to change that. We want to restore those standards of living for Australians. We want to restore the dream of homeownership.

The other thing I want to reflect on in my comments—and I acknowledge that the government has now decided to adopt the coalition's policy of reducing the fuel excise by some 25 cents a litre—is that, a couple of weeks ago in this chamber, when we talked about fuel shortages and when we said that petrol stations were running out of petrol and diesel, those opposite laughed at us and said we were scaremongering and that we were causing people to panic buy. But it was true. We were being told by people, particularly in regional areas at that point in time, that they were going to petrol stations and there was no fuel. Those opposite denied it; they said it wasn't true. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy and the Prime Minister said: 'It's not true; it's scaremongering. You're causing people to panic buy.' Within 24 hours of that, the energy minister came out and said, 'Actually, we do have a crisis.'

The point I want to make here is that, for some reason, those opposite—the Prime Minister particularly and, in this case, his energy minister—have their heads in the sand when we have significant problems, and they are in denial about the scale and the significance of those problems until they can no longer deny them. Australians deserve a government that is proactive, will lead and will plan to navigate challenges like those which we are facing today. They do not deserve a government that has its head in the sand, particularly on the back of all of the cost-of-living pressures that Australians have been under for the last four years. Not least among those is yet another interest rate rise, announced a few weeks ago, which, once again, means a greater impost on family budgets, a greater impost on small businesses that are trying to work out how to make ends meet and a greater impost on the tradie who's trying to work out how much diesel they can afford to put in their truck to go to the next job, on top of the soaring prices of all the materials that they need, whether they be a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, a bricklayer or a builder. This is the reality that Australians are facing, and this government needs to step forward and lead proactively, not reactively.

Question agreed to.