Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

For every Australian mum and dad who has shares in these businesses through their super funds and who are benefiting in their retirement from their businesses, this is exactly the kind of financial security that the Greens would rip out from underneath them.

Moral grandstanding about Australia's fossil fuel industries, coal and gas, may make some people feel better about themselves, but shutting down our industries will have exactly the opposite effect to the one they claim they want, because, if Australia withdraws from exporting our high-quality coal and gas, global emissions will rise. The Beetaloo basin has some of the lowest-emissions gas in the world. When we don't produce it, countries like Malaysia and Vietnam, who are building LNG import terminals, will go to Qatar and the US to buy gas. They will not be building the number of solar panels and wind farms that the Greens would like us to have, because that cannot support them. That cannot provide the reliable, affordable energy that they absolutely demand.

So Australia has a clear choice. We either adopt the European model of energy security, offshoring our energy security, or we adopt the US model and make ourselves energy secure. The Middle Arm precinct is a part of that. The Middle Arm precinct will allow for the development of important gas basins like the Beetaloo. The gas will either come east and south down the pipeline or, yes, be exported. But, either way, lower-emissions gas is better for worldwide emissions. The Beetaloo Sub-basin is one of the largest undeveloped onshore gas resources in the world, and development of this resource has the potential to create 6,000 jobs by 2040. It would transform the Northern Territory's economy and supply gas into domestic markets for decades to come. One petajoule of gas can power 19,000 homes for a year, and the Beetaloo has approximately 200,000 petajoules of potential supply. When you don't develop supply, like Victoria, you see the result of that. The results there are coming home to roost. The last thing we need is more bans and more moratoriums.

The coalition strongly support more gas production more widely. In government we committed $108 million to deliver on this gas-fired recovery. That is a fraction of the royalties, company taxes and PAYG taxes paid by this industry. The idea that the taxpayer is funding the fossil fuel industries, gas and coal, is just not true. That is a fraction of the income that this country receives from that industry.

Read the budget. The risk of hysterical activism to our economy and to our environmental standing is incredibly dangerous.