Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can indicate, as the previous Labor speaker did, that Labor will support this legislation. I've listened with interest to the contributions thus far. If you take this issue of fuel security, it really revolves around three central concerns which I think even the Prime Minister accepts are actually national responsibilities. This is a bloke who has ducked most of the responsibility for the core issues of Australians in the course of the pandemic, but I think even he accepts that energy policy, industrial capability and national security are core national responsibilities. After listening to the last two contributions, you can see why the Liberal Party and the Greens can never be trusted on these core national issues.

The bill does involve a substantial subsidy to the two remaining oil refineries. The key question that Australians should be asking, though, is 'What took you so long?' These are sensible measures that should have been implemented when there were four oil refineries—four operating oil refineries—instead of, now, just two. For all of the laps of honour that the government is demanding for taking these measures, it's actually the Australian Labor Party that has been campaigning and fighting to make fuel security a national interest priority.

In particular, I want to acknowledge the Australian Workers Union, who have fiercely advocated for their members in the refining sector for years. Similarly, my old union, the AMWU, has long represented maintenance workers in this sector. As an official I saw very closely what impact the refinery closures in Sydney had on not just the workers. Anybody can do the cheap maths and add up the number of workers and divide it by the package. There are of course the interests of the workers who are directly employed. There are the interests of the subcontractors who work in those facilities—many, many thousands of them. There are the interests of the hundreds of Australian firms in the supply chains that rely upon these refineries.

And then, of course, there are the interests of our future manufacturing capability and our future national security, all of which were entirely ignored by this government until the pressure got too much. Both the Transport Workers Union and the Maritime Union have also been publicly campaigning to raise awareness on these issues.

There are still outstanding concerns. Australia will still be noncompliant with its International Energy Agency obligation to hold 90 days of reserves. Australia will still disproportionately depend on imported fuel from vulnerable supply chains, still leaving us vulnerable to geopolitical tensions. We still lack a strategic national fleet, which leaves us reliant on a fleet of internationally owned, operated and crewed tankers. There is no Australian fleet. In the event of a crisis, the government would not be able to requisition tankers because we don't have any.

The bill has come too late for the hundreds of refinery workers who've lost their jobs and for thousands of direct subcontractors and supply chain firms. They join thousands of workers from Holden and Ford, the shipbuilding industry and rail manufacturing who've lost their jobs as a result of this government's negligence when it comes to manufacturing capability and fuel security. That's tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs and technical jobs—the people who actually wear hi-vis to work and have it as a requirement of their job, not as a dress-up for a photo opportunity. They actually put it on seven days a week, get up early in the morning and go to work.

This crisis has all of the familiar tropes of the Morrison government—an obvious problem left unsolved, ministers posted far above their obvious competence, rank amateurism that cost Australians their jobs, press conferences with little flag lapels and all of the hot waffle that comes along in a Morrison press conference, saying the word 'sovereign' over and over again while trying to look tough—