I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for inquiry and report by 15 February 2027:

The operation and administration of the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility, with particular reference to:

(a) the extent to which the facility impacts investment in fertiliser production or importation, processing, storage, transport and distribution;

(b) the facility's contribution to national food security, regional economic development and the continuity of essential services;

(c) the accountability and effectiveness of financial assistance provided for fertiliser through the facility; and

(d) any related matters.

Australian farmers cannot grow food without reliable access to fertiliser. When international supply was disrupted earlier this year, the Commonwealth had a responsibility to make sure Australian farmers could get the fertiliser they needed. I think we all supported that objective here. The question before us is not whether the government should have cared about fertiliser security—of course they should—but whether the government properly considered what its intervention might do or what consequences could flow from that to the industry and to the market.

The proposed inquiry I have before the Senate today is that the operation and administration of the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility be looked into. The question is: has the government properly considered what this intervention has done to the market? Has this actually strengthened Australia's fertiliser security, or have we got a situation where, in an attempt to solve an immediate problem, perhaps we've created a bigger problem down the line. I think that's what we need an inquiry to establish.

The Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility provided government backed support for additional fertiliser imports during a period of international disruption. On the surface, that sounds pretty straightforward—there is a shortage risk, so the government helps bring more product into the country—but markets are not that simple. Fertiliser supply depends on businesses making decisions months in advance. They commit capital, they arrange international supply, they organise shipping, storage and transport and they accept the risk that prices and exchange rates will move against them. They do that because they expect to compete in a functioning commercial market. When government suddenly enters the market and takes away some of the risks for selected participants, we need to understand what then happens to everyone else. This is not an argument against intervention in every circumstance. It's simply an argument for understanding the consequences before we find taxpayers are put on the hook.

The first question this inquiry should ask is whether this facility genuinely created additional supply. We also must ask: did the assistance bring fertiliser into Australia that would not have otherwise arrived, or did it support transactions that might have occurred anyway? Did the government properly account for products already in the country, existing contracts and shipments already on their way? These are fair questions. These questions matter because the government should not claim success simply because more fertiliser arrived after the facility was announced. We need to know what difference the facility itself actually made, which is why we should be examining how the scheme affected competition. If one participant in the market receives government backed protection against commercial risk while another does not, this can then affect behaviour. It can affect investment decisions. It can affect stock values. It can affect who is prepared to commit capital early. It can affect whether businesses remain willing to participate in that market in the future. This is a very real concern.

Fertiliser security policy should encourage businesses to secure supply before a shortage becomes critical. It should encourage investment in storage. It should encourage investment in transport and distribution. It should encourage more competition and more resilience. It should not create a situation where businesses conclude that acting early with their own money leaves them exposed while waiting for government assistance may be the safer commercial decision. The question is: has that happened? We don't know. That is exactly why this needs to be looked into and why an inquiry is needed. The government should be able to demonstrate that it considered these risks. It should be able to explain how assistance was allocated. It should be able to explain what safeguards were used to protect competitive neutrality. It should be able to show that taxpayers received value for the risks they were asked to carry.

There is also the question of what benefits actually reached farmers. Farmers, understandably, want lower fertiliser prices. That's what I want for farmers. But fertiliser prices are often affected by international markets, shipping costs, exchange rates and global supply. A lot of onshore decisions made by government drive up electricity prices and drive all sorts of businesses that actually assist in the production of fertiliser out of business. But I digress.

If prices fell during the operation of the facility, the government cannot simply assume that its intervention was responsible. The inquiry should establish what happened to prices, what happened internationally at the same time and how much, if any, benefit can reasonably be attributed to the facility. Taxpayers have taken on financial risk, and Australians deserve to know what they received in return.

The most important issue goes beyond the immediate operation of the scheme. There's another issue of Australia's long-term fertiliser security, because we have become heavily dependent on imported fertiliser. That leaves Australian agriculture exposed to events we cannot control. As we've seen, international conflict can disrupt shipping. Foreign governments can restrict exports. Global prices can rise quickly. Supply chains can fail. When that happens, Australian farmers are left vulnerable. The answer cannot always be another emergency government intervention. We need to ask why Australia, a country with enormous natural resources and one of the world's major agricultural industries, is so dependent on foreign production for something so fundamental to our food production. That is the sovereign capability question at the heart of this. Are government policies encouraging Australia to manufacture more fertiliser here, or are they making domestic production more difficult while making imported production comparatively more attractive? That question goes well beyond any single plant or any single company. It's about the investment environment across the whole of the industry.

A business considering fertiliser production in Australia needs confidence. It needs access to affordable and reliable energy. It needs regulatory certainty. It needs confidence that government policy will not change the commercial environment after billions of dollars have already been committed. It needs to know that government intervention will not unexpectedly change the competitive balance in favour of imported products. These investment decisions are made over decades, and they cannot be switched on or off according to the political problem of the day. That is not the type of market people can function in.

When the Commonwealth designs an emergency measure, it needs to consider much more than the next shipment. It needs to ask what signal it's sending to future investors. Does the policy encourage sovereign capability? Does the process encourage more storage and processing? Does it encourage a greater diversity of supply? Does it encourage businesses to take commercial risks before a crisis, or does it reinforce dependence on imported product and government intervention? These are questions the government should have considered before the facility was designed, and I think this inquiry will help the government advise, or perhaps even establish, whether they did do this.

There's a real danger in approaching these issues of national security in our food chains one crisis at a time. Disruption occurs, government intervenes, the immediate pressure eases, and then everyone moves on until the next disruption. That is not resilience. Real resilience means having the capability before the crisis occurs. It means having multiple suppliers. It means developing our own sovereign capacity to manufacture fuel or fertiliser. It means having transport and distribution networks that reach all across regional Australia. It means having domestic manufacturing capacity where it's commercially possible. It means having government policy that supports these things rather than undermining them.

That's why we believe that the Senate should be looking at the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility as more than an emergency purchasing measure. It should be examining what the facility means for future investment, production, importation, processing, storage, transport and disruption. That is expressed in these terms of reference. We need to consider whether Australia has the right arrangements for our future emergencies. There may be a role for strategic stockholding. There may be a role for minimum stock requirements. There may be other market based mechanisms that provide a buffer against disruption. But whatever approach Australia takes, it must not undermine the businesses that keep the ordinary market functioning. Emergency policy must complement the market, not replace it.

The principle should be simple. Government should make Australia stronger after an intervention, not weaker. If taxpayers are used to protect supply, that intervention should leave us with more resilient market. It should not be reducing competition. It should not discourage investment. It should not punish businesses who may have acted early before a crisis. It should not make Australia more dependent on imported fertiliser in the future. One Nation wants Australia to be capable of producing more of the essentials we rely on. Food security is not possible without fertiliser security, and fertiliser security cannot simply mean hoping overseas factories keep producing and international shipping lanes remain open. We need sovereign capability. We need reliable supply chains. We need government decisions that are made with the long-term national interest in mind.

We'll accept the government was right to recognise that international disruption posed a risk to Australian agriculture, but recognising the problem is not the same as designing the right solution. I think we do need to determine whether the government properly considered the consequences of its intervention. Have we genuinely increased supply? Have we delivered value for the taxpayer? Have we preserved fair competition? Did we strengthen the businesses. Australia depends upon, or has the opposite occurred? Have we actually made Australia more secure, has the government, through a failure to consider the longer term consequences—as we know, they quite often do—risked making us more dependent and more vulnerable in the future? Those are serious questions and they deserve proper answers. This is why the inquiry is necessary, and I do hope the Senate will support it.

I support this referral of the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee. Fertiliser is not a luxury. It's a critical input that supports Australian agriculture and Australian food production both for Australians and of course for hundreds of millions of others around the world. For farmers, particularly in regional and northern Australia, the cost and availability of fertiliser directly affects farm viability. Just last week in Mareeba I was speaking to farmers who told me that their fertiliser bill had doubled, a massive impost on the viability of that business.

If fertiliser supply is disrupted, the consequences flow through farms, transport operators, regional businesses, families and to every Australian, and Australia has seen how quickly global supply chains can be disrupted. Australians have also seen how this Albanese Labor government shoots from the hip on policies. We deserve to know whether this facility is actually delivering greater fertiliser security and supply resilience. Is this government support building long-term resilience or simply responding to short-term shortages? We need reliable fertiliser supplies when farmers need them, not after a supply disruption occurs.

We also need a government who are transparent with the Australian people and, importantly, with Australian farmers. Government financial assistance must provide value for money. We need transparency around who receives government assistance, how this program was drafted, who was consulted, what the outcomes are and, of course, who the beneficiaries were.

Is taxpayer support delivering additional investment and greater supply security? The inquiry should examine whether the facility is supporting the resilience of regional supply chains. It needs to identify what is working and what needs to change. It needs to examine the entire fertiliser supply chain, from production and imports through to the farm gate. We need to ensure that government intervention is targeted and effective and delivers genuine long-term benefits, because regional Australia needs practical outcomes not additional bureaucracy. Australian farmers are amongst the most productive and resilient in the world because they're not subsidised, unlike many farming supply chains around the world. We should not make their job harder by leaving critical Australian inputs vulnerable to international disruption.

We learnt this during COVID, when Australia came within two weeks of running out of fertiliser and pesticide supply. I'm incredibly proud of the work that the coalition did, particularly the work Matt Canavan did as the then minister for resources and Northern Australia to ensure that the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility made funds available to back the Perdaman project. The Perdaman project is an important project at Karratha in Western Australia. It takes natural gas, available from those massive gas projects there, and converts it to urea. Thanks to the foresight then, that project will come online early next year. That will supply around two million tonnes of urea to Australian farmers per year. Urea is an important product not just for farming but also as an additive for fuel—something else that we all learnt during COVID.

That is a project that will add to Australia's fertiliser security, but we need to ensure, through this inquiry, that Australia really has invested, over this most recent shortage, into the sorts of investments that will provide genuine fertiliser and fuel security. It wasn't just a bandaid that would get us through the shortage and not leave Australian farmers with more affordable supply and more predictable supply. We know that food security is national security. We know that fertiliser security is food security. This inquiry is an important opportunity to ensure that Australia is prepared not just for the next season but also for the next decade.

I was elected in 2016 in May-July. I started in July. I've had more than 10 years since I first joined the Senate. I've been elected once and re-elected twice. In that 10 years, I've learnt that every major problem in this country is due to the uniparty. Your policies on energy, your policies on climate fraud, your policies on water—disgraceful. You've done everything you can to hammer workers into subservience. You're both guilty of mass immigration.

Australia has fallen from having the No. 1 highest per capita income in the world a hundred or so years ago to now being headed out the back door. We're heading for 20th thanks to you lot. We are still the richest nation in the world for resources per capita, yet now we're dependent on communist dictatorships and the unstable government for much of what we need in this country. Our manufacturing has been shot, thanks to you lot, so we're now dependent. We must have new capability restored within our borders—we drill for oil or gas within our borders, process it, refine it, transport it, and put it in bowsers, then into cars, trucks and tractors, with the whole process in our country. What's the matter? You have abandoned that. You've both caused it.

We need the same for fertiliser. We need to restore Australia. We have the world's highest per capita resources, yet we're heading down the road to poverty, thanks to you lot. We need to get the data on why this has happened. We need to get the data on what we need. We need to get the facts. That's why I support this inquiry that Senator Bell has had the courage to put forward.

Like Senator MacDonald, I very vividly remember standing up in this place a few months ago, and Senator MacDonald and I—I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here—both spoke about the importance of securing adequate fuel and fertiliser for seeding. We put pressure on the government at a time when they were sitting on their hands saying, 'Nothing to see here.' It was only about a month later, when suddenly service stations started running out of fuel, that the government realised that there actually was something to see here, and it was something very, very serious, particularly for our agricultural sector.

Senator Roberts, one lesson you learn in this place is that not all government actions are good actions. Not all government schemes are designed well. Sadly, with this government, you see case after case where schemes that should be doing good for a sector actually end up being destructive, undermining the very sector they are supposedly trying to help. I have my doubts about that, but let's just put that to one side.

There were very serious issues with the potential availability of fertiliser for seeding and post seeding. As a result, the government put significant public funds of $7½ billion to underwrite urea imports. Later, it came out publicly that the underwriting and support given to the imports of urea went to the three largest companies alone, ignoring the smaller, mostly family owned fertiliser businesses in this country. It is actually those smaller fertiliser businesses that, to a significant degree, have been left to carry the cost of this government intervention, which picked winners. You hear those on this side often talk about the danger of picking winners. It's not some abstract concept. It's because, if the government singles out three players for special attention in a relatively dynamic market, then that is going to have a distortionary effect on the market. That is what happened here. That evidence is very clearly available.

Sadly, what is not clear is what the government actually paid for, what that money was contracted to do and what it actually did in terms of the deals that were done behind the scenes, because literally almost nothing has been published on this matter. Almost nothing is publicly available. As far as I can tell, no criteria were ever published. There was no open process. The consultation that did occur certainly did not occur across the entire industry. It happened with a few of the bigger players. The smaller players in the industry were effectively completely cut out and there was no way for anyone to know in a transparent way what was happening in the market and what this was going to do to the market.

So the level of uncertainty in the market, rather than being decreased—presumably the entire point of the government stepping in in this way was to try and decrease the level of uncertainty, decrease price volatility and help farmers actually understand what the price was going to be—instead did the opposite. It made farmers less certain. It left other purchasers of fertiliser in the market, such as the other suppliers—the mum and dad suppliers, the small business suppliers—completely in the dark as to what the true cost, the market cost, the price and the overhang price were going to be. The key thing is that, when you've got markets that are being actively intervened in by government but in a completely non-transparent way, everybody loses certainty.

There's almost no evidence on the public record. There's $53.6 million that's been booked by an ASX listed company as a government grant that looks like it was tied to this fertiliser underwriting scheme, but we're not actually sure about that. We therefore don't know how that risk in the marketplace is being apportioned amongst the various players. But we do know that it has now massively distorted the market and undermined the balance sheet of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller players in the market.

This is an extraordinarily important issue that we need to get to the bottom of. It's certainly something that I know many will be following up at estimates, but I think that the standalone inquiry is warranted. I think this is an example of where government intervention has been poorly designed. It looks like it was actually designed post fact. I think it is extremely worrying, from a governance point of view, that the resources were effectively allocated and then the scheme was designed. I may be wrong about that, but, again, we're just not being told. We've got almost no information on the public record.

This is not the way to treat the fertiliser industry. This is not the way to treat the Australian farming community. If you're going to intervene, intervene in a transparent way—a way that helps all players, that doesn't pick a few winners and that doesn't massively distort the market for more than a season. That is what the Labor government has done.

The question is that the motion as moved by Senator Bell be agreed to.