Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to follow the member for Corangamite and to endorse the Australian Energy Market Amendment (Gas Legislation) Bill 2006 as he has endorsed it. Why? Because this bill is about centralism not federalism. This bill is about the Commonwealth, in cooperation with the states, taking over power to control a national gas pipeline. I am glad that recalcitrants in the coalition—not that the member for Corangamite could be typified in that way—have finally come to see that the old federalism of the Fraser period, the old approach to Australian affairs, where whatever powers the states had had to be locked up forever for the states to simply have what they had at the start of 1901, has ended. This bill is yet another nail in the coffin of that type of approach to national affairs.

There has been another significant move in this area. The member for Corangamite well knows this; he has picked it up on his radar. There is $10 billion of Commonwealth government money going into a national water plan. Guess what? It is a Commonwealth takeover of state powers. It is centralism.

This mob over here spent decades railing against the concentration of power at the Commonwealth level. I have to tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker—and the member for Corangamite might well appreciate this—when Labor were last in power we saw that the disparate arrangements that we had in compartmentalised approaches to state run pipelines and state electricity grids needed to be entirely renovated. We saw that there needed to be a revolution in energy supply and in cooperation between the states and, if it demanded it and if it needed it, that had to be centrally driven. This is one of those wonderful cases where ideology fragments in the face of practicality, where the old way of doing things is completely shattered. I think what has been done on water is the right approach to take for a continental Australia with continental problems.

Colonial Australia understood it. When the first ships came out, individual colonies developed that were isolated in time and space from each other. They ran their own affairs. From the 1850s onward they developed their own legislative assemblies and legislative councils. There was a change of structure in terms of power relationships between the governors and the parliamentary entities. We know how difficult it was to get a country unified in 1901. That took 10 full years.

We might think of 10 full years as a long time—certainly the last 10 years plus has been a long time with the coalition in government here in Canberra, a long time for those people who have been on the end of that particular stick. But it was a 10-years-plus process to cohere the Australian states and to get them to understand, to sign up through a referendum to a national way of doing just certain things—post and telegraphs, defence and one other: customs and excise duties. That was it from the start—three things.

But here we have an old ideologist in the member for Corangamite coming out of the states’ blocks, out of the Victorian blocks—and he was right to make the point about the energy use in Victoria—but seeing a broader view. I am glad that this kind of revelation could happen in the 21st century for both him and some of his other colleagues on what was railed against forever. In Australia, it is a great privilege to live not just in one country but in one continent, surrounded by seas. We have been compromised in our history time and time again because of the shackles of that very history.

We saw the debate in the parliament yesterday about the issue of a national curriculum and who has pinched whose idea about this. Just in passing: John Dawkins, in 1984, the then minister for education, was kicking off the process to try to knock the states’ heads together, to try to get a national approach with fundamental educational principles Australia-wide, to start the process to drive towards not only bringing in lots of people from overseas to study here and to build our educational capacity and earn more money but fundamentally and very importantly taking the first key steps with Dr Paul Brock, who was then his chief educational adviser, to get a national approach to our educational problems.

What has been the fundamental problem—the glacial approach in the 23 years since then? The fundamental problem has been the states’ bureaucracies wanting to hold tight to their constitutional certainties. That is what has caused the problem in relation to this. That is what has to be shattered in exactly the same way as the issues here of who owns what gas pipeline in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia or whatever. That has to be shattered in the national interest in order to get not just economies of scale but an approach that is entirely consistent in terms of our energy use and production for Australia as a whole—a centralist approach. Maybe sometimes it is necessary. Maybe that is why, as embryonic as it was in 1901, we formed a Commonwealth in the first place, where we could do things in a coherent, national way.

What we have done so far in this—and it has taken quite a while for this bill to actually get here, as the member for Corangamite and others know—is take steps along the way to a more unified electricity system, steps here to a uniform provision for gas pipelines across Australia and sensible direct provisions in this bill to assist a greenfields pipeline program for gas pipelines that were not there before. Western Australia has specific provisions under this bill. Everybody else is going to have to take their own approach to put in their own legislation. Western Australia is different. Why? Because it is half a continent. Why? Because there are such rich gas resources, not only land based but off Western Australia.

Back in the 1960s, as I know certainly from Claude Killick, who is the president of Condell Park branch—because he was out in the boat with the Yank captain, off looking for petroleum, and he ended up on Barrow Island—he saw the scans, around Barrow Island and the area they were mapping looking for petroleum resources, that were alive with gas resources.

In the Chevron project on Barrow Island, with its associated first attempt, really, in Australia to lock up the CO directly into the ground at the place where they produce the product, when I went there the initial cost of that program of sequestration was $36 million; the projected cost was about $60 million. It was a condition of their going onto Barrow Island to do this particular work in the gas area, from the state government of Western Australia, that they undertake the sequestration of the CO, and the work that has been done there is brilliant. But it is not just the Gorgon field that has been developed. We have a minimum of 60, maybe 100, years of resource security and gas supply just from the Gorgon field and its associated field. They are also exploring further out in those other rich areas that Claude Killick and others saw on their screens in the 1960s.

We have an immense resource that needs to be used well. We have a resource now as part of the Gorgon project that needs to be pipelined back into Australia. Most of that product goes overseas where we will earn income not just from Japan or China but largely from Korea and other areas. So it adds to what has already been done, but this is new capacity that is coming on line. There is also a direct pipeline to the mainland to feed into the national grid and be part of the national gas pipeline. It is a fundamentally important thing for Australia to build this capacity. Coal was our greatest export. What is our most underutilised resource? It is gas.

We have a major contract worth $25 billion to supply Guangdong province in China. That allowed Woodside to say: ‘We’ve got three trains set up on the Burrup Peninsula. We can now commit to a fourth train.’ Even though the contract was at a 30 per cent discount because the Prime Minister really wanted to push forward and get this project underway, the other ones that we have signed up to have meant building capacity—Woodside has a fifth train. We saw the recent development yesterday on the Sunrise agreement with Timor-Leste for the further development of those fields.

But we do not use our gas well enough in Australia. This government never gave the go-ahead to Chevron on the mainland to develop a gas-to-liquids regime. I know because I was briefed when I was running Labor’s regional committee. The person who did the briefing now works as chief adviser in this area to Martin Ferguson. She is quite brilliant in the area, as Chevron was in saying: ‘Here is an absolute resource that Australia has. We not only flog this stuff overseas; we should be developing a gas-to-liquids industry here in Australia based on that rich resource to feed in to all of our natural gas needs and our energy needs in Australia and do it on a national basis.’

I think it was short-sighted in the extreme for the government not to really give this project a go and put effort behind it to get it started, because we need new national schemes, not compartmentalised state approaches to these things. We need new drivers for our economy. Given the nature of Australia, it will always be in the energy area that governments really need to be pushed. I am glad to see that very shortly we are going to get an answer from the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources on a report that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources brought down in the 39th parliament. We are now up to the 41st parliament, and I have been on the industry and resources committee from that 39th parliament. We have had to wait for these bills.

It is an old sort of approach here that the government blames the states and says they have taken all the time in terms of coming to an agreement. We know how recalcitrant the states can be, but we know that the Commonwealth should be the engine driver of this approach. It is right and proper to have an entirely national approach to this issue and have a coherent program. It is also right and proper that we drive from a national level. We need to have a national pipeline running from one end of Australia to the other and we need to feed into that national pipeline, not just for our domestic use as it is now and not just for the use of current industries. We need to build new Australian industries Australia-wide utilising our resources, because it is much more efficient with respect to greenhouse emission than utilising coal. We know that our coal-fired power stations supplied with natural gas from offshore Western Australia and mainland Australia will work better, fire better and be more efficient. Gasification of that process means that there is less greenhouse effect and therefore less global warming as well.

It is an excellent thing to see that the member for Corangamite has announced effectively today—inherent and inferential though it might be—that he has finally become a centralist and that he finally believes in the Commonwealth of Australia’s national powers demonstrated in this bill! Let us see it happen in a whole range of areas. Let us see that not just with water but with gas. Let us see it happen in education. Let us see the Commonwealth government really willing to take on the key issues that we have and from a leadership base say: ‘We not only believe in ourselves; we believe in the people of Australia and their willingness to cooperatively reshape the map of Australia politically by doing things from a totally national perspective.’ In deference to those who want to go on with the adjournment debate, I will finish my remarks there, but it is a wonderful day, Stewie, on which you have become a centralist!

Debate (on motion by Mr Neville) adjourned.

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