Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Fuel Security Bill. As a former shadow minister for defence and having served in a number of portfolios which have national security responsibilities, I want briefly to add my voice to those of others about the significance of having fuel security in this country. In the mystical lottery of nations, Australia absolutely won the jackpot. What we have as a nation is a whole continent to ourselves. That really is the fundamental fact which is at the heart of any proper analysis that tries to understand Australian strategic policy. What it means is that every critical activity that we undertake onshore leverages the advantage of having our own continent, our own island, with all the incredible national security advantages which come from that. Equally, every time we lose a critical activity and every time we lose industrial sovereign capability, we remove the most significant natural advantage that we have.

It is hard to conceive of a more critical fundamental activity than having the capacity to supply our own fuel. It's fundamental in so many ways in terms of how our economy operates. This bill and the package that it underpins will ensure the continuation of the two remaining refineries in our country, which, with our own oil reserves, will enable us to survive for a considerable amount of time, particularly with the refining of diesel, were shipping lanes to be disrupted. It puts us in a manifestly different position than were we to have no refining capacity at all. So, from a national security point of view, this legislation is fundamentally important. It is deeply essential.

It would be remiss of me not to point out that, as supportive as I am of this legislation, the package has come too late for the two refineries that have closed within the last 12 months: ExxonMobil's refinery in Altona and BP's refinery in Kwinana, in Western Australia. That is a pity, and we are less capable for the loss of those refineries. But, at this moment, it is important to acknowledge the significance of this bill in underpinning the future of the Ampol refinery in Brisbane and the Viva refinery in my electorate of Corio, in the northern part of Geelong.

After making those opening remarks about the national security implications of this bill, I really want to spend the bulk of my time tonight focusing on that refinery in my electorate, because it is so central and significant to the lives of people in Geelong. The components of what was then the Shell refinery which was built in Corio, in the northern part of Geelong, actually were intended to be assembled in Indonesia. They were shipped out to the island of Sumatra, at a site near Pangkalan Brandan, just prior to the Second World War. With the onset of the Second World War, it was impossible to construct the refinery, but, remarkably, at the conclusion of the Second World War, the unpacked refinery, as it were, had not been touched by the occupying Japanese, and so the asset that Shell had there was still intact. That said, there was some hesitancy on the part of Shell in London about following through on the construction of the refinery at that site, given the political uncertainty in the region as it was.

So, from there, Shell's head office in London decided instead to ship the items to Australia and to establish the refinery in Geelong. The federal government at the time agreed to let those components come into Australia free of duty, and indeed the Indonesian authorities at the time allowed for the components to leave Sumatra. The plant was then constructed on a 132-hectare site which had formerly been grazing land, in 1951. It was constructed by a Dutch contractor called Werkspoor, and there was an agreement between the Victorian state government and the ACTU at the time to enable labour to come in from the Netherlands to help in the construction, given that the skills that were required to construct the refinery were not present in Australia at the time. In combination with that, the harbour trust built a pier at the site and organised for the dredging of Corio Bay, which allowed ship access to the site. Its construction is, in a sense, one of the great stories of Australian migration. It speaks so much to the history of this country as an immigrant nation. A thousand workers from 14 countries around the world, but particularly from the Netherlands, were involved in the construction of the refinery, from 1951 to the point of the refinery being opened, in March 1954. To this day, there is a Dutch community in the northern suburbs of Geelong, in Corio and Norlane, who owe their origins to those workers who came out to help build the Shell refinery, as it was, in the 1950s.

My father was a teacher at Geelong Grammar School, which was adjacent to the refinery site. It's where I grew up and spent my childhood. So I actually grew up right next to the refinery, and it forms a large part of the memory of my youth. I can remember, in days when there perhaps weren't quite the same environmental standards as there are now, getting on my bike, riding around the refinery and picking up yellow blocks of sulphur, I think it was, which I happily took back to my parents and put on the kitchen table. They obviously were completely horrified with what I'd managed to retrieve and picked it up with plastic gloves and made sure it went into the bin straightaway. But such was my youthful joy, or glee, over this miraculous establishment next to where we lived.

When I was older, a student at the school, there was a clock tower that I used to be able to go up at night-time. From there, the view of the refinery was something to behold. The thousands of lights and the flame above it made it look like some kind of fairy kingdom. It was our own personal display, for that end of town, and it really was a remarkable sight to behold. There was, and still is, a red-and-white smokestack, and on the very many journeys that we would take from Geelong—and this is a story that is very familiar to people who live in Geelong—you would know, on returning, that you were approaching home when you could first see that smokestack on the horizon. It was the very literal symbol of Geelong and home on the horizon—that we were about to arrive home. It was, in a sense, a beckoning. It was a beacon for where home existed.

So, for many of us, there is a deep personal connection that we feel to the site. In April 2013 Shell announced that it intended to sell the refinery. At that time 450 people worked onsite. We thought, at that point, that the refinery might close and would instead turn into an import terminal. But, fortunately, in February 2014 it was announced that Shell had been able to sell the refinery as a going concern to Vitol, and in August 2014 Viva Energy Australia was established to operate the refinery, which it has been doing ever since. To this day, 400 permanent staff work at the refinery, along with another 350 permanent contractors. Viva contributes something like $200 million through wages to the local economy. They've also been very focused on investing in the site. They've committed to investing the better part of $1 billion over a five-year period to the upgrade of the site through a number of significant works. Indeed, since taking over they've already spent $600 million on the upgrade of the site.

When you do a tour of the site it is an extraordinary example of industry, of human ingenuity. There are pipes going in every direction. What's remarkable to me is that there is, right there, some of the highest-level tech manufacturing that occurs in this country today, but presumably somewhere is a pipe that was taken from Europe to Indonesia back in the 1930s or 1940s. In that sense, the refinery itself is a kind of living site. It has matured as the city has grown up.

What all of that story and sentimentality, I suppose, says is that the refinery is principally about producing a product, which, as I said at the outset, is fundamental to how our economy operates. It's a place that employs hundreds of constituents of mine and provides a significant contribution to our local economy. All of that is deeply important, but it's actually much more than that. An industry of this kind—a place of this kind—goes to the culture of the town in which it exists.

In that sense, it's not unique. There would be major facilities of this kind in various settings around the country, where people would have the same kind of emotional attachment. But its shape, its size, its landscape, its skyline defines the place in which I live. It defines the memories of my childhood. It defines how we see the world, in Geelong, in which we live. In Geelong Trades Hall there is a mural of Geelong, and right in the centre of it is that red and white smokestack that I refer to as a symbol of what Geelong looks like. That's what this refinery is. It is profoundly important to the shape, the size, the place that is Geelong.

While speaking to this bill and supporting the important national objective that it has—and it's a very important national objective, in giving us the national security that we need—if I'm to be honest, at an emotional level, much more significant to me is what the impact of this bill will mean on the continued existence of the Shell, now Viva, refinery at Geelong, its contribution to the local economy, the jobs that it provides to constituents of mine but its place in the soul, in the landscape, in the identity of Geelong. While nothing lasts forever, that this will now be the case for many years to come is, for me—and I know to everyone in my electorate—a very welcome development indeed.

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