Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight, I rise to note my constituents' concern around Australia's liquid fuel security. I have spent the last few months conducting town hall forums in my electorate of Canning. There is no better way to connect with your electorate. It is an opportunity to hear directly from them and hear about their concerns and their anxieties. One of things that keeps popping up is national security. They are deeply concerned about national security. I would regard my electorate of Canning as very patriotic. People love Australia. They want our country to continue long into the future. So the things I talk about regularly are the two key tasks of the federal government—national and economic security.

My constituents are observing the rapidly changing world that we live in. They are noting the terrorist attacks that we are seeing throughout the West. We have seen another one today in London. They are watching North Korea closely. I get a lot of emails about that. They are watching an assertive China, particularly in the South China Sea. They are also watching the Middle East. People are, indeed, concerned. One issue that keeps surfacing is the issue of foreign ownership, particularly the sale of critical infrastructure to state-owned enterprises. The sale of the Port of Darwin continues to emerge. There is a lot of frustration about that. We cannot roll that back. But, certainly, I will not this in the House: my constituents do mention it to me quite regularly. I am proud that our government has taken action. Last year, in March, the Treasurer announced new laws that any state infrastructure worth $250 million or more, if it was to be some, would first have to go before the Foreign Investment Review Board. That has given the Australian people a lot of confidence that we will not just be selling off critical infrastructure.

Having said all that, fuel security is something that keeps popping up. I am not going to say anything new tonight. This is all on the public record. But I do want to note two reports. The first was by Mr John Blackburn AO, who submitted a report to the NRMA on Australia's liquid fuel security in February 2013. Also, I want to mention the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee report which was submitted in June 2015 and entitled, Australia's transport energy resilience and sustainability. Both reports make very interesting reading. Taken together, Australia is in a position of significant vulnerability. A couple of themes emerged. We are a resource-abundant nation. We are the world's ninth-largest energy producer. By the end of the decade, we will overtake Qatar as the greatest producer of liquefied natural gas. We are geographically isolated. Geoffrey Blainey, one of Australia's famous historians, talks about the tyranny of distance. We have always relied upon imports for a lot of our supplies.

Despite the strategic advantages that we have in the abundance of energy supplies, we are heavily dependent on imports of refined petroleum products and oils to meet the demands of Australian consumers and, also, to carry out essential tasks, like maintaining a defence force, maintaining supply chains throughout the country and all those other essential parts of the economy that we take for granted.

So why are we at risk? We have a limited and diminishing refining capacity in this country. If you look at the detail closely, we only have four refineries still in this country. In Queensland, there is the Eromanga refinery. It is a regional refinery for local industrial use. It only produces 1,200 barrels per day. In Victoria, you still have the Altona and Geelong refineries producing about 200,000 barrels per day. Then, finally, in Western Australia—and just to the north of my electorate—we have the Kwinana refinery which produces 138,000 barrels per day. It is the largest refinery in this country. I note the closures in New South Wales of the Clyde and Kurnell refineries in 2012 and 2014. In South Australia, the Lonsdale refinery was mothballed in 2003. It closed in 2009 and it will be demolished in 2019. So we rely upon supply from overseas. Fifteen per cent of crude oil is produced in Australia; the other 85 per cent we receive through imports. In 2012 we were refining 75 per cent of that oil, but as of 2014 it is about 57 per cent.

The world is changing and there are great risks and so we need to secure our energy supply.