Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are a few of us—not so many of us right now sitting in this chamber—who would remember the 1970s and the big queues for petrol as a global oil crisis hit our country. I remember as a kid sitting in a car—I can't remember if it was odd or even days—on whichever day my parents were allowed to get petrol and thinking, 'This is strange. We are wasting an awful lot of time.' As kids, we sang a lot of songs sitting in the car in a petrol queue waiting to get petrol. I hope that is not a vision that the government wish to see repeated, but there's been such a delay in taking any action on the fuel situation we face in Australia that it's a wonder we haven't gone back to that and it is partly why I think our fuel security from a consumer perspective is so important.

I live in a peri-urban area. We go everywhere by car. When fuel prices go up, we feel it first. We spend more on fuel and tolls and we don't have the easy option of public transport. So this fundamental issue of fuel supply security is absolutely essential for a community like Macquarie. Back in 2017 I sat on JSCOT and this issue ran adjacent to the context of Australia's international obligations to have fuel reserves. I remember there being questions about us failing to meet our global agreements around international fuel supplies at that time, and that continues to this day. I remember the department talking about our own sources of supply here, and we were reassured that we imported crude oil from 21 countries and we refined product from 47 countries, so there were multiple sources. But, even at that time, it didn't help us meet our international obligations, and there were real concerns about our long-term fuel security. That was 2017 and that goes to just how long this issue has been around and how slow this government has been to do anything tangible. When they do come up with something tangible like these bills, which are welcome, they are the consequence of failure. There is only action after there's been failure, after more Australian refineries have closed down.

No-one questions that a secure fuel supply is critical not just to drivers and commuters in my electorate but to our whole economy, to our ability to move across this great land, to be able to—well, to mix my metaphors—grease the wheels of the economy. We need it not just for travelling by land but for flying, for the movement of groceries, construction supplies and medical equipment. We've seen that need grow even more. We saw extraordinary need in my electorate in March, when floods closed every route and the first road to open required a five-hour trip to get groceries delivered. We need to know that fuel is going to be there. It's only now we are close to nearly 100 per cent dependency on international supply chains and we're seeing job losses across the refinery sector. It is only as 50 per cent of our refineries close that we are getting action.

As I say, this wasn't unforeseen. A Senate inquiry in 2015 was the first in recent times to recommend the government undertake a comprehensive review of Australia's fuel security problem. It took three years—until I did my parallel inquiry into our global obligations around fuel—before an inquiry happened. That wasn't until 2018, with a due date for release of 2019. It just seems odd to me that fuel security and the jobs of thousands of refinery workers only get noticed when things are really a problem, when things are really going bad.

The interim report of the Liquid Fuel Security Review was delivered to the government two years ago, in April 2019, but we still haven't seen the final report. It was due late 2019, so we can't blame COVID for that one. We have not seen a report. The government chose not to act then, not even to deliver the final report. Thanks to that failure, we have been left almost entirely reliant on global supply chains for one of our most critical economic inputs. We do know, though, that the interim report identified a number of things that could have been acted on over two years ago—things like noncompliance with the International Energy Agency obligations for domestic fuel stocks, which I've already referred to, and our requirement to have 90 days of fuel stocks domestically to help protect against global and domestic oil shocks, which I've also mentioned. We weren't compliant then and we're not compliant now, but we could have done something about that. There have been very small steps taken to address that issue. When we talk about supplies now, we are at 58 days in our global agreement. That's 32 days short of the 90 days we've said we would have fuel stocks for. We're not just letting down Australians when we do that; we're not meeting our international obligations.

The average Australian home spends the same amount of money on fuel as they do on electricity and gas combined. I haven't seen the data from my electorate, but I'd wager that we spend more because of the distances that we have to travel. We also need fuel stocks for industry. We need them for defence. We needed them when we had planes fighting bushfires. Aviation is essential, and the world is becoming increasingly volatile. For a government that seems to like to talk a lot about national security, it has, for the last eight years, been absent from the debate about how we secure our fuel supply.

We have been an outlier. It's interesting to think about the fact that the government's policy makes us more and more dependent on fuel, as drivers of cars, because we don't have a policy on electric cars to encourage people to find an alternative. It's one of those ironies, when you think about it. Fuel security is more of an issue, yet we are more reliant than ever. Think about it: if there were a policy that encouraged people to buy electric cars, it would actually lessen our dependence on petrol, as consumers and as drivers, and ease up the demands on fuel. The Electric Vehicle Council notes not just a lack of policy but also the consequence of that, saying that it has created a market here where we are 'uniquely hostile' to electric vehicles. That's not the average punter, but they're the policy settings that we face. We used to try and be world leaders in Australia. We used to pride ourselves on being early adopters and being ahead of the pack, even inventing things and leading the world that way. We're not doing that now. We're not leading the world in terms of electric vehicles. We're certainly not leading the world in the development of vaccines and helping to meet the current demand. We are at the back of the pack in a whole lot of ways, and electric vehicles are one of them.

Only 0.7 per cent of cars sold here are electric, compared to a global average of 4.2 per cent. In the United Kingdom and the European Union it's 11 per cent and in Norway it's 75 per cent. This isn't because Australians don't want electric vehicles. A majority of Australians say they would consider one for their next car, but they're not available at an affordable price. There are no electric cars available in Australia for under $40,000, and there are only five that you can buy for under $60,000. Compare that to the United Kingdom, where there are eight models that are cheaper than the cheapest model in Australia. That's because we've had policy settings that lock us into the old technology of petrol powered cars. It's because of inaction and scaremongering by those opposite. Who can forget that the Prime Minister and multiple frontbenchers were saying during the last election that electric vehicles would end the weekend, that they would stop people from being able to enjoy their weekend. What a nonsense that was, because we can see all the models that are coming out from the major car manufacturers. It's just that they're not coming here, because we don't have policy to support them, and they're not going to get here in any decent numbers until we do. That is going to make us more and more dependent on traditional fuel supply.

Labor has an electric-car discount policy that is going to cut import tariffs and fringe benefits tax on non-luxury electric vehicles. That could be a game changer for our industry, but in the meantime, we are left with a bill like this that requires us to back in some things to support fuel security. We will do that, but we know this is not going far enough.

One of the key problems with the bill before us is that it's all announcement and not so much delivery. I'm really getting sick and tired of hearing people on the other side talk about the pandemic as the reason that we have found ourselves in this situation, when we know there is a very long history going back to an inquiry by the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee in 2015, quite a few years before COVID. I really hope that those opposite don't try to pull this one off under the cover of COVID.

Let us think about what was actually promised and compare it with what is being delivered. The Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Mr Taylor, and the Prime Minister—they are very good at announcements, just not very good at delivery—announced a fuel security package that was going to secure Australia's long-term fuel supply and was going to create over a thousand new jobs. Let's be clear about what we have seen since that announcement. We've seen the closure of two of Australia's only four remaining refineries, so half the refineries we had in this country have closed since their announcement. I don't call that job creation. In September the Prime Minister and the energy minister again claimed their package would 'back local refineries to stay open'. Then on 30 October—six weeks later—the Kwinana refinery in Western Australia announced it would close. On 14 December the minister claimed:

… the Government was taking immediate and decisive action to keep our domestic refineries operating.

'Hear, hear!' we all say. But, no, within two months, on 10 February this year, Exxon also announced that its Altona refinery would close. What about the jobs? What about the people who no longer have a job in a refinery as a result? Those two refineries alone directly employ 950 people between them. So perhaps when the government was announcing a thousand new jobs it should have said, 'We're getting rid of nearly a thousand jobs.' There are also thousands more jobs in fuel-dependent industries that are on the line. The petrochemical manufacturers all rely on by-products produced from these refineries—the ones that have announced closures. I think that is just more proof that the government knows how to talk about jobs but doesn't actually know how to deliver them for this country and for Australians.

It was clear to us when these announcements were made that it wouldn't be enough. We warned that it wasn't enough. It failed to address Australia's fuel security needs, just as we've been warning for years about our increasing dependence on foreign fuel imports in a changing world. Problems with our fuel security and the need to have greater onshore stocks existed long before COVID, going back six years. But this government, as always, chose not to act. It waits until the very last minute before it does something—always waiting, always too slow and never enough.

See this speech in context