Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Revenue) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for O’Connor for acknowledging that point. Unfortunately, we do not have an energy policy in this country. We have an energy white paper—which I suppose the government could argue presents a guide to future directions in energy policy—but we do not have an energy policy per se. I will be interested to hear what the member for Kennedy has to say on this issue when he follows me. The member for Kennedy and I often do not agree on these issues, but at least he understands that Australia needs direction in energy policy. I am delighted that we are debating energy issues more and more in this parliament—unfortunately, it is because of necessity. When I was the Labor spokesperson in the last parliament, energy was emerging as a big issue, particularly as it relates to climate change and the challenges that poses for us. As we deal with the enormous demand from China in particular and as the world gets even more focused on climate change and alternative energy, we are talking about energy policy in this place more and more—and I could not be more pleased about that.

I thought I would make a sketch of what an energy policy is, so I jotted down four points. It is not exhaustive, of course, but I have had people ask me: ‘What is an energy policy after all?’ It is not rocket science, to pick up on the pun used by the member for O’Connor. The first point is that an energy policy plans for our future needs, including recognition that most of our energy today comes from finite resources. Our coal and our gas are not infinite sources of fuel. Of course oil is another example. That is another story, but it is certainly not an infinite source. We need to look towards alternative fuels. The member for O’Connor talked about hydrogen, and I agree absolutely that that is ultimately our goal. I do not believe the technology and the economics are there yet, but we do need to be striving towards a hydrogen based economy.

The second point in a national energy policy is that it must maximise our energy independence. This is not something we do well in this country, and we have seen the results. We see today, through higher fuel prices, what large exposure to the Middle East in particular but also to the global market can do for the independence of our economic settings here in this country. We must strive towards greater energy independence. We are now fast approaching something like 60 per cent on the importation of our oil, and would you believe we are now importing about 22 per cent of our refined petroleum. No-one would have dreamed only a decade ago that that would be the case.

Unfortunately, in this country our major oil companies are focusing not on our energy independence but on value for their shareholders. There is nothing wrong with focusing on value for their shareholders—they have a fiduciary duty to do so—but we need the government to take some control in this country, to steer the oil companies in the right direction and make them see that there is something beyond digging it up and shipping it out, whether it be coal, iron ore or, indeed, our natural gas reserves.

A theme is developing in this country. That theme, developed by the major oil companies, is that they will make Australia the LNG hub of the world by exploiting our natural reserves of gas and shipping them offshore at bargain basement prices and that they will make Qatar in the Middle East the GTL hub of the world. In other words, all the value adding will happen in the Middle East because that suits the major oil companies. That suits their corporate architecture. That suits their goals in producing value for their shareholders. We cannot allow it to keep going in that direction.

When we signed the 25-year contract with China back in about 2002—it seems an eternity ago—I was pilloried for criticising that deal. People said: ‘What are you talking about? This is the biggest trade deal Australia has ever secured.’ I criticised it because we gave it away. It was only a month or so ago that I felt vindicated—and I was not delighted; I was upset—when I read on the front page of the Australian Financial Review that someone had finally woken up to this and worked out that we had been dudded to the tune of about $7 billion over the term of that contract. The fact is that we went into a competitive market with the Indonesians, the Chinese were happy to have us in competition for that market and in the end the Chinese took both sources of gas at bargain basement prices. We are stuck with that price contract for 25 years, and that will have add-on effects for the future renewal of other contracts with other trading partners such as Japan. Japan is going to turn around and say: ‘The Chinese are getting the gas much cheaper than we are. We want a new deal as well.’

I am all for exporting LNG—don’t get me wrong—but we have to have a plan for our own use of natural gas. We have to be value adding in this country. We have to be producing diesel liquid fuels to drive our motor vehicles, for example, from our natural gas. We have to be fuelling value added industries in the more remote regions of our country. But we are doing nothing about that. We do not have a plan.

The third point I wrote down was: clean and efficient. We have to have an energy policy that allows us to consume our fossil fuels more cleanly and more efficiently. The government would claim that, through processes like the white paper and, of course, their involvement in AP6, the Asia-Pacific partnership, they are striving towards cleaner fuels. I support that as part of the mix of things we need to do to drive down our contribution to global warming, but I do not see them doing a lot on the efficiency side. I do not think they are doing anything on the efficiency side.

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