Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was a very good contribution by my colleague from Western Australia. He raises some very, very important points—not just about the Petroleum and Other Fuels Reporting Bill 2017, but about, in general, our fuel supplies, our refining capacity and our gas markets. The current gas debate is interesting. The Prime Minister would have you believe that he's just become aware of the gas crisis, and that it is the fault of the previous government, and maybe the previous government before that—he tends to blame his predecessors for so much.

But the reality is all of this could be seen, very clearly, coming down the pipe at us. I remember in 2012 and 2013, industry, particularly manufacturing, coming to members of this House. They were reliant on gas, not just the price of gas but the supply of gas. I know they came to me and to the then member for Throsby—now the member for Whitlam—and they talked to us about it. I would be surprised if they hadn't talked to the then opposition about it as well—it was the sort of thing industry would have been concerned enough about to talk to both sides of parliament. They would have wanted us to take a bipartisan approach to fixing the issue. The member for Throsby moved, and I seconded, a motion about these issues in the gas market in 2013 in this parliament. So these issues were entirely predictable. The price of gas and the supply of gas and the effect of Gladstone and the export market were all predictable. Whichever government survived—whether there had been a re-election of Labor in 2013 or whether it had been a coalition government—it was incumbent on that government, that Prime Minister and that energy minister to address those things there and then because you can't make fast moves in energy markets. Nearly everything takes time.

What we have here is a pretty timid bill that's been brought into the House that is mainly regarding statistics. Statistics and information collection are particularly important, but this is a timid bill in terms of the approach that it takes. It's a timid bill by a timid government—a government that's barely getting by at the moment on these gas markets. As the previous speaker, the member for Burt, said, along with this timid legislative response we have the Prime Minister playing year 9 drama lessons with the energy executives of this country. They must be so impressed that they are being brought to Parliament House under threat of a wagging finger, being brought into a committee room and being paraded around while the Prime Minister gives this finger-wagging speech about how industry should run. The PR for the day is done. They all dust off their hands, and off everybody goes, with no real action. That's not the way governments should approach energy issues.

If you read Gareth Evans' diaries—it was quite an interesting period of government—he talks about when the North West Shelf was almost going to fall over. For want of an $80 million contract from the Western Australian government, he spent all day in private meetings with industry. He had meetings with government bureaucrats, the minister and the industry all day to try and get resolution of those matters, and he did get resolution of those matters. That's what serious governments do. They don't do public relations exercises on the hop because they've been caught out on issues they should've dealt with some time ago. They engage with industry properly, with a view to the public interest. Companies are entitled to have their interests. We as a nation are entitled to our interests, and that's one of the reasons why in 2015 the Australian Labor Party National Conference had a national interest test. That's one of the things we put in place as our response.

During the 2016 election, nearly a year after that national conference, we were criticised by the now government as being reckless and interfering. All the things they say about us now and say about the Leader of the Opposition now are the same things they said then about this important issue. Later on, they tried to adopt a policy that was not quite our policy but trending in that direction. They've been playing catch-up footy on this issue of gas supply and of gas price. It is completely ridiculous that we should not protect our domestic market, our domestic manufacturers and our domestic consumers in the face of supply issues with the export market versus the domestic market. Frankly, this issue came up some time ago in Western Australia, and it was a matter of dispute between the court and the Howard government. That was resolved by the then Western Australian government, in defiance of the Howard government, and actually shielded the domestic market of Western Australia. So it's not like we didn't have knowledge of or a precedent for what was going to go on in the gas market, and it's not like this government has anything to stand on in terms of its attacks on the Labor Party and the like.

It's very concerning that we have a government of this nature, and it's a consequence of having revolving-door prime ministers. We have had two Prime Ministers, three ministers for defence—playing musical chairs on our National Security Committee—and maybe 14 or 15 or possibly more other ministerial changes, so it is little wonder that very important things get shuffled off to the to-do list. In many ways this is reminiscent of the 1930s, particularly the post-Lyons first Menzies government period when ministers were so consumed with their own internal dynamics that they did not see what was coming.

It's interesting to talk about statistics. I have a 2013 publication by the Australian Institute of Petroleum, Maintaining supply security and reliability for liquid fuels in Australia. I remember reading this document at the time, and it's interesting, when you look back at the collection of statistics which are obviously used by institutions like this and by academics and by government and politicians, to find out what our vulnerabilities are. It talks about the traffic, and if crude oil was coming from West Africa it would have taken 28 days; from the Middle East, 18 days to Western Australia but 24 days into the east coast; from New Zealand—if we were to get any crude oil from there—it was four days; Russia, 17 days; Papua New Guinea, seven days; and, from South-East Asia, somewhere between nine and 14 days, depending on whether it was going to the west or the east coast. On petroleum products, again from the Middle East, it is some 23 days for LPG; India, 13 to 21 days; South-East Asia, six to 12 to 14 days, depending on where it's going; and South Korea 13 days and the same for Japan.

The same page of this document, page 8, describes shipping security assessments, and there is a profoundly benign assessment about the security environments at that time in the Strait of Hormuz, in the Malacca Straits and through the Indonesian archipelago, around Singapore and the like. When we look at what's going on in the world—in the South China Sea, with Russia and China, and with what's going on in the Middle East—we have this upsurge of conflict or the potential for conflict. In the Middle East we have a war that has been raging now for years; very violent wars in Syria and very violent conflicts in Yemen. We have the potential for clashes across the Middle East. In the South China Sea, the situation is volatile to say the least, we have a volatile situation in North Korea and we have countries like Russia who are quite simply waging war in many ways in all but name. There's a lot of literature around the place from Chatham House and from other notable think tanks that outlines information warfare, the open warfare in Ukraine, the seizure of Crimea and the infiltration into and destabilisation of the electoral affairs of many democracies—the UK and the Brexit vote, the US presidential elections and the like. So, we now know that in a short period of time we have come to live in a less benign and very threatening environment, and, when you take into account Australia's collapse in refining ability combined with our geographical isolation and where we have to get fuel from, that is an issue that this parliament has to think about extremely clearly.

We need statistics to do that, so good on the government for bringing in this bill—but it's a timid bill in the face of a very unstable geopolitical environment. We should think about this very carefully as a nation in case we face fuel shortages—and other nations have. The UK faced a fuel shortage as a result of a refinery strike and it had very serious ramifications at the time. We are very dependent on fuels. We need to not just have statistics but think carefully about the supply of those fuels to make sure that we have enough domestic supplies, that we have enough domestic storage and that we have enough refining capacity. It is a critical thing for our economy, a critical thing for our defence and a critical thing for our sovereignty.

While we're looking at those things, we should also look at other areas where we will need to have sovereign supplies in a worst-case scenario. It's not good enough now simply to look at benign scenarios and assume the worst-case scenario won't happen. I think the drums are beating in so many ways, and I don't think wishful thinking in these circumstances will see this nation through. We need to accept that we live in a very dangerous, volatile world. While I commend the government for bringing into this bill a statistical information requirement so we know where we stand, that simply will not be enough of a response to our domestic concerns in terms of the gas or electricity market, or for the supply for our country in a time of desperate crisis. With those words, I'll conclude.

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