Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to petrol prices.

All Australians should be seriously alarmed at the complete failure of leadership of the federal government on this matter of Australia’s future oil supply and the notion of peak oil. What has been clear for some time to me and other people who look at global energy is that the age of cheap, plentiful, easily accessible oil is over. Whether or not we have now reached peak oil or will reach it in the next decade—and there is certainly a growing consensus of opinion that that will be the case—the fact is we have gone past the period when oil can be found easily, pumped easily, refined and put onto the global market. We are now in a situation where the world has started using more oil than it found in 1981, and by 2005 only about one barrel of regular conventional oil was found for every five or six consumed.

Oil has to be found before it can be produced. What we are seeing is a lot more money being spent on fewer and fewer discoveries and smaller and smaller fields. We are looking, as Colin Campbell has said, at the long, remorseless and relentless decline that is the other side of the oil peak. So what we heard Senator Minchin say today, that supply is a function of price, that if the price goes high enough then you will find oil, is a complete nonsense. Oil and gas are finite resources, and we are now in the age of decline. What we ought to be doing is recognising that Australia has to get off its dependence on oil as quickly as possible. We know that, for example, Australia currently imports about 25 per cent or more of its oil, and that is set to double by 2015. So within less than 10 years we are going to be importing more than 50 per cent of our oil—if it is available at all.

We have to take into account that countries, not companies, own the oil around the world. Some 80 per cent of the oil is owned by the Saudis, the Russians, a lot of African countries and so on, and they might not necessarily want to sell it to us anyway because they have already entered into long-term supply contracts with countries such as China. The fact is the Saudis have exaggerated their reserves—we know that. We know that climate change is taking out production and refining facilities and we know there are geopolitical factors in play.

Australia is in trouble because of its high dependence on oil. We have to rapidly shift to oil-proofing the country. That is why the Greens argued for an oil inquiry. That is why we argued that we should not have had tax cuts this year but should have spent the money on investing in public transport in our cities to start reducing Australia’s dependence on oil. Reducing our use of cars in the cities would be good for congestion, good for greenhouse and good because of oil prices. We argued for a mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standard. The Chinese have got one. It is no use signing up to an Australia-China free trade agreement when the cars we produce in Australia will not meet the mandatory Chinese fuel efficiency standard for a start.

We need to offer incentives to get cars, business fleets and heavy vehicles onto natural gas and LPG as transitional fuels, and they are transitional fuels. We need to look at, as the Premier of Western Australia has said, setting ourselves an Australian reserve of gas. We are in an energy crisis here, and it is not something that the market will fix. ABARE has said that we can liquefy coal, but we cannot because of the climate change ramifications. The emissions from the tailpipe from liquid coal are the same as those of conventional oil, and we cannot live with that in a world threatened by climate change. We have to accept that Australia must do what Sweden has done and set a target to get ourselves off imported oil and become oil free, or as least dependent as possible, as quickly as possible and stop talking about short-term bandaids and recognise the biggest threat—the risk to the Australian economy from climate change and oil depletion—and do something about it. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.