Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to my Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Domestic Reserve) Bill 2023. With this legislation, I deliver on my commitment to ensure the Australian people benefit from the natural energy and mineral resources they own. I've been fighting for this for many years. Australia has tremendous reserves of natural energy resources, which are some of the largest in the world. Yet we face energy shortages, driving up our energy prices to among the highest in the world. This makes no sense. This natural wealth, which should make every Australian rich, has been squandered by successive Labor and coalition governments over decades, allowing other countries to use our continent as a cheap dirt mine. It is fundamentally wrong any way you look at it. It is a betrayal of the Australian people, incredibly damaging to our economy and makes us an international laughing-stock.

I can only imagine what Norwegians think of Australia's approach. They are laughing all the way to the bank. Norway's sovereign wealth fund, built on revenue from the country's oil deposits in the North Sea, is now valued at A$2.17 trillion. That's almost $400,000 per Norwegian. It's easily twice as much as most Australians' superannuation balances, although that's probably an unfair comparison, because our super comes from our individual earnings. Norwegians contribute nothing personally. All that wealth comes from their natural resources and governments which have wisely created and invested in it.

When I think about the wealth Australia could have generated from natural resources which dwarf Norway's, I get very angry. This criminal waste of our natural wealth is an outrage. It's why I introduced my Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Benefit to Australia) Bill last year, hoping to generate more revenue for the nation from the exploitation of our resources. The main parties voted against it, faithfully serving their paymasters in the resources sector and continuing the betrayal of the Australian people.

There's been one small step in the right direction recently, and it's something for which I have lobbied the past three prime ministers. On my first meeting with the current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, I pleaded with him with regard to the PRRT in relation to the North West Shelf, and now he's proposed changes to the petroleum resources rent tax, the PRRT, that are forecast to increase revenue by about $2.4 billion, something that we've never had before. In comparison, Qatar reaps $26 billion a year in government revenue from its gas. We export more, yet we only get $2.4 billion, and that's only forecast. It's a positive step, if a very small one, and continues the trend of the major parties adopting many of One Nation's policies. This legislation is another step in the right direction.

Australia has some of the largest reserves of natural gas on the planet, and we're the world's biggest exporter. About 93 per cent of these reserves are in Commonwealth waters, concentrated in the North West Shelf of Western Australia. The majority of it is exported to Asian markets—so much, in fact, that Asian customers pay less for our gas than Australians do. Go figure. A small amount of it is kept in the west thanks to a policy of the Western Australian government to ensure 15 per cent of the gas processed in the state is kept as a domestic reserve, and this has been done for decades. However, this resource is primarily in Commonwealth waters, and my bill seeks to create from this resource a domestic reserve of gas that benefits all of us, not just Western Australia. This national reserve would address looming domestic shortages in this critical energy resource.

Today's Australian Financial Review newspaper reminded readers that the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO, warned us back in March that east coast gas exporters may have to break long-term sales contracts with Asian customers to prevent domestic customers running short. They wouldn't have to do it if my bill is passed. We'd have all the gas we'll need. And make no mistake: we'll need it, as Labor and the Greens continue with the suicidal rush to unreliable renewables. Gas is essential to make renewables work. Labor and the Greens won't acknowledge this truth, but the evidence is undeniable. Electricity grids require sustained input that intermittent renewables just cannot provide. Gas is the only available dispatchable backup in many cases, thanks to the premature closure of coal-fired power stations across the country. Forget green hydrogen as a replacement for gas. That's a Green pipedream that does not stack up economically and very likely never will. We're nowhere near having it available to us—not for at least another 20 years. It's all a pie-in-the-sky dream. Now we're going to need gas for a very long time to come, since Labor has decided to have 82 per cent of our energy generated by wind and solar by 2030—pie-in-the-sky stuff. My bill will create that critical reserve of this essential energy resource. It will help stabilise prices and our increasingly fragile and unreliable energy grids.

Petroleum and gas resource companies will make the usual noises about sovereign risk. Their representatives said as much to my office today. But it's a joke. It is a lie. Western Australia has had its domestic gas reserve policy in place since 2006, and investment by resource companies in that state has only increased. The experience overseas puts the lie to the sovereign risk argument too. The foreign-owned multinationals who whine about sovereign risk in Australia have no problem operating in countries like Norway. They have no problem operating in Qatar, as I said, which generates $26 billion a year in revenue from natural gas exports, compared to the $200 million or $300 million generated in Australia; that's all we were getting. They have been so used to getting their way with the major parties, so, of course, they're going to complain.

My bill will amend section 95 of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006 to include references to a condition that petroleum and gas producers must enter into a domestic reserve agreement with the Commonwealth. The substantial amendment is the introduction of a new section, 162A. This new section provides: that licencees will have 12 months to enter into a domestic reserve agreement from 1 January next year if this licence was or is generated before then; that licencees will have 12 months to enter an agreement from the day the licence is granted if this happens after 1 January next year; that for each year the agreement or licence operates, the licencee reserves an amount of petroleum or gas equivalent to 15 per cent of the amount exported by the licencee the previous year; and that such agreements must operate for a minimum 10 years. If the first contract expires but the production licence is still in force, licencees will be required to enter a new agreement.

The really curious thing about this legislation is that it shouldn't be controversial and should enjoy universal support in this parliament. But for the obvious exception of the Greens, who have less economic expertise than your average guinea pig, why would it be controversial for the Australian people to receive any sort of economic benefit from the resources which belong to them? I urge all senators to remember they're not here to represent the interests of foreign-owned multinationals or Asian importers of Australian gas; they're here to represent the interests of the Australian people, and my bill advances their interests.

As a lot of people would say, you'll vote against this. I know your attitude—because One Nation puts up these bills, you won't support them. A lot of it is common sense and it's for the Australian people. I'm urging you to really think about this. We have a shortage of gas. We export around $4 a gigajoule for gas to overseas countries while Australians here have paid up to $28 a gigajoule for gas. Do you really believe that's fair on Australian people? With this bill, we'll ensure that we do have a gas supply. We have enormous reserves and we should be utilising them to ensure that households, those mums and dads, aged pensioners, have a supply of energy for our needs in this country. We have manufacturing industries that will go under.

If you look at it realistically, your renewables will not work. They can't stand up. In South Australia, they rely on gas because the wind doesn't always blow and the solar panels don't work at night; you have to have another supply. The dream of having green hydrogen—it's not possible. There's nowhere in the world where it works. You're only lying to the Australian people by saying, 'We're going to have this.' It's all pie-in-the-sky. You're cheating the Australian people. You're lying to the Australian people. You're lying about the environment and saying that the world is coming to an end if we go up half a per cent or we're going to have temperature rises, which are all lies.

What I'm saying here is the Australian people are struggling. Their energy costs are going through the roof. People are losing their homes because they can't pay their mortgages due to rising costs, and this all comes down to energy. Like I explained, Norway has a tremendous wealth fund gained from their resources, and we have been so stupid in this country; we haven't done it. We've had governments or members of parliament who have never had long-term vision, as our politicians did a century ago. They're here just for your term, and all they want to do is make sure that they make the right decisions to win their seats back again. But they're not making the right long-term decisions for this nation and it's a shame because it is the Australian people who are missing out.

This is a great opportunity that we have to actually recover from our resources some money that we can put to good use. We're struggling with hospitals—in rural and regional areas hospitals are closing down—schools and infrastructure. The roads are an absolute blasted mess. There's so much waste of government money, and you're scratching around and you're bringing in a productivity commissioner who's talking about a heritage tax—that's a death duty or tax—raising the GST, having more taxes on the Australian people and hitting independent retirees and looking at possibly including the family home in assets for the aged pension. All you think about is taxing the Australian people all the time.

You're not thinking. Use your brains. Politicians have to problem solve, and a lot of you have no background or experience in business and in running a business. You wouldn't have a clue. You're absolutely brain dead when it comes to things like this where you can make money for this country. You know how to bloody spend it, but you have no idea how to make it. For years in this place I have been begging former prime ministers about what to do with the PRRT. Finally we've got it, and guess what? It's $2.4 billion, and we'll possibly end up with more than that, because you've actually listened to what I've had to say.

Start listening to the grassroots. Start caring about the grassroots Australian people. Start making them some money instead of spending it all the time. As far as I'm concerned it's an absolute bloody waste. Start learning how to make money. This would be a good start.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Domestic Reserve) Bill 2023 proposes to amend the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act to impose a new obligation which would apply to petroleum companies operating in Commonwealth waters and would reserve 15 per cent of produced gas in any given year for the domestic market. That sounds reasonable on the face of it, but this bill would actually have no material effect on the supply of domestic gas. Unlike the opposition and One Nation, the Australian government has proposed real solutions to address gas supply. Passing this bill would involve tearing up a whole series of longstanding export contracts with key regional partners, such as Japan and South Korea—places that rely on our gas for their energy security.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So you care less about the Australian people than about—

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I sat here for 15 minutes and listened intently to what Senator Hanson had to say. She may want to show the same respect and stop yelling across the chamber.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't make stupid statements.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy President, I do object to being called 'stupid' in this chamber by Senator Hanson.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson, please restrain yourself. She actually said 'stupid statements', but, either way, it's disorderly. Senator Hanson, please restrain yourself.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As well as yelling across the chamber, One Nation talks about reserving gas for domestic purposes. The reality is that this bill won't have an impact on the domestic gas supply. It targets the petroleum fields in Commonwealth waters off New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia where there are currently no producing projects, so therefore it will have absolutely no impact whatsoever. I think that's about all we need to say here. This is not a useful bill. It will not do what it purports to do and it will have no material impact whatsoever on the supply of domestic gas in Australia.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do applaud Senator Hanson for bringing forward the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Domestic Reserve) Bill 2023. I think it's a very important issue and one that should be looked at again in this country. There is no doubt that we've all come to the conclusion that the Western Australian gas reservation scheme is a much better standard than how we've developed our gas resources in other parts of the country. I make the point upfront that effectively it appears to me that Senator Hanson is seeking to use that as an example here with her bill, which also requires effectively the reservation of up to 15 per cent, just like the Western Australian model. Of course, that already happens for gas, including gas in Commonwealth waters off the Western Australian coast. Western Australia enforce their policy through the fact that that gas almost invariably, with one exception, has to come onshore to the Western Australian coast and therefore this 15 per cent reservation can be applied there.

When I read the bill it was a little unclear to me exactly how Senator Hanson's bill would interface with the Western Australian standard. I realise there's a provision in the bill that would allow the Commonwealth to 'gift', if you like—that's my word, not the bill's word—the 15 per cent to a state jurisdiction, but it's not spelt out whether exactly that would happen in the case of Western Australia or whether it would be left to the discretion of the Commonwealth government. I think that creates a bit of uncertainty.

I also think we need to be very careful in the way we design a reservation scheme. When I was resources minister we signed, for the first time, a memorandum of understanding with a territory government to have a reservation scheme of some kind in regard to the Beetaloo basin. I haven't heard much from the current government about developments on that, but I do hope that, if the Beetaloo basin ever does come into production, the MOU is honoured and we see a cooperative agreement between the Commonwealth and, in this case, a territory jurisdiction to ensure that some portion of that gas is left for Australian uses and that not all of the gas is exported. It is very important to get these settings right, because developing our oil and gas reserves requires billions upon billions of dollars of capital. There is a great risk that, if we were to act in an injudicious way, people wouldn't invest in our country.

I don't quite agree with Senator Hanson that it would be best for us to move to a Norwegian or Middle Eastern model, where the state owned gas or oil companies are developing resources. That traditionally was the way in Norway. Norway's fields are very different to our own. They're very liquid-rich, very lucrative. Basically, a monkey's uncle could drill in those fields and still make money. The Australian oil and gas fields are much riskier, much more difficult. We saw that recently with the failed—or what appears to be failed—investment of Shell in their FPSO, their floating offshore LNG production vessel. It's had huge cost blowouts, and it looks like it will not make them a profit over time.

So there is risk here. If we were, as a government, to make these investments it could be the taxpayer, ultimately, that makes those losses, not an overseas company. I actually think it's better that we allow companies, which have much greater experience and institutional knowledge about developing these resources, to take those risks—that we allow shareholders of those companies to take those risks. They may make money, and, if so, they deserve that reward because they've taken the risk. In a case like Shell's FPSO, which may lose money, at least the taxpayer is not on the hook for that.

What we should do, of course, given that these resources are the Australian people's resources, is to make sure there's a significant return of any profitable investments to the Australian taxpayer. We do that principally through the existing Petroleum Resource Rent Tax arrangements, which have raised a lot of money for Australia over time. There's a lot of controversy about those right now, but over the past decade those arrangements have attracted $200 billion of investment in Australian oil and gas, and that's been of great benefit to the broader Australian economy. There have been lots and lots of jobs and business created by that investment, obviously, as those LNG projects have been built, and now they're really delivering revenue as well. Gas is now our third-biggest export, behind coal and iron ore. It's worth between $70 billion and $80 billion a year. It's very significant for our country. I'm sure that over time it will also lead to higher returns. With the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax being a superprofits type tax, it takes time, given those large investments, for those projects to become profitable and the taxes to be returned to the Australian people.

In saying all of that, I do think we need to look again. It was probably regrettable, in the case of the Queensland LNG investments—which were onshore and wouldn't be captured by this bill, admittedly—that we didn't reserve any of that gas for Australia. All of that effectively was sent offshore. Given the shortages we're seeing on the east coast now, perhaps a different decision should have been taken, principally by the Queensland government—they're their resources, not the Commonwealth's. That's something to reflect upon.

I listened to Senator Grogan's speech to the bill earlier, and I wasn't sure that she was correct about this bill only applying to Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, as I think she said. I didn't see that in the bill myself. I don't think there's any geographic restriction. As I mentioned, WA is already effectively taken care of by its state scheme, so, at best, this bill would probably be inconsequential to those arrangements, and that is where most oil and gas from Commonwealth waters now comes from. The Bass Strait is another area which significant amounts of gas still come from. It's rather dry now, from an oil perspective. However, those fields are already 100 per cent domestic and always have been. They were effectively built and developed to help support the Victorian manufacturing industry and still largely serve Australian needs. This bill, again, would at best be ineffective there. The joint venture there that existed between BHP and Esso would still be easily meeting a 15 per cent reserve requirement and well above that. There aren't significant gas reserves that have been developed in New South Wales. There's one very controversial one in PEP-11, but it could still be many, many years away. Obviously, developments off the coast of Queensland are not going to happen, with the Great Barrier Reef being there. There won't be oil and gas production there.

That leaves the Northern Territory, which does have significant oil and gas reserves to the north. This bill notionally would potentially apply there. I would suggest, though, that, if that's the only area we're targeting, we could probably do something a little bit more targeted than the broad-brush range of this bill, which I think raises the particular risks that I mentioned of deterring and not attracting investment. I would recommend the kind of model that is being developed through the MOU I developed with the Northern Territory. It's something we should probably cooperate with the Northern Territory on, especially with the development of the Middle Arm proposal. We could probably do that on an intergovernmental level without the need for this kind of nationally scoped legislation, which may have inadvertent consequences for areas like Western Australia and Victoria, where there's not really a reservation issue or problem.

I've had some brief discussions with Senator Hanson and realise she has a different view, but I do have some concerns that this bill could have a retrospective impact. I wasn't able to listen to Senator Hanson's entire speech, but, to me, the explanatory memorandum of the bill doesn't rule out the bill potentially applying to existing licences. The explanatory memorandum says:

If the Bill passed into law petroleum production licensees would be given 12 months to enter into a domestic reserve agreement with the Commonwealth for 15% of their exports and satisfy the condition of their licence.

To me, that does seem to capture existing licences, because they'd have 12 months—it says people with production licences would have 12 months to enter such agreements. I don't support any retrospective treatment of fields that are already producing. Those investors have come here with certain rules of the game, which did not include a reserve requirement. They've spent billions upon billions of dollars. I will give the example, which is the one exception I mentioned earlier, of the Ichthys field, off the coast of Western Australia. That gas does not come onto the shore of Western Australia; it goes into Darwin. It was developed primarily by a Japanese company, INPEX. That doesn't get the WA 15 per cent treatment. The project was roughly $40 billion of expenditure as a whole. It's the biggest Japanese investment in history outside of Japan. I really don't like the idea of governments after the fact—after attracting that investment and after laying out the rules of the game for those investors—coming along and saying, 'Hey, we're going to change the rules now, and we want a bit of that production that we otherwise signed off for you to have.' I think that's just wrong. It's ethically wrong to act in such a way. It's duplicitous, if nothing else, and, as usual, duplicity has perverse outcomes. Going forward, people would be less attracted to come to this country and invest in our nation if we were to include such requirements.

I would suggest to Senator Hanson and other senators that maybe this sort of issue needs to go to a committee of some kind to look more deeply into these issues and make sure things like that are properly captured in any particular legislation that comes before this place. I do want to see further action here. Putting aside questions around how much oil and gas should stay in this country, the broader question is: are we going to develop oil and gas at all? We've actually got to get that first.

I was a little concerned yesterday when Senator Pocock asked an excellent question in question time about the fact that most of us would have noticed when we drive past the petrol station that they're all above $2 now. Some people are seeing $2.30 or $2.40 for diesel. I don't know how people are affording to pay to fill up their tanks. It'd be well over $100 for almost everybody. If you have a big car, it'd be over 200 bucks. It's crushing people. In response to that question, all the minister could talk about was electric cars. I checked this morning because I thought it was a bit strange. The cheapest electric car in this country is the Chinese-made BYD Dolphin, and it costs $38,000. How is a family who can't afford 100 bucks to fill up their tank going to afford a $38,000 car? That's the government's solution right now. You're struggling to pay for petrol? Go buy an electric car. It's ridiculous.

It shows how out of touch these people are. They don't understand average Australian families. They're already struggling to keep their home. They're up to their eyeballs in debt already. They can't go get another loan or another lease for a $38,000 car. This is absurd. That's the cheapest. That's the entry-level electric car.

Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, and a battery that catches fire.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't get me started on that, Senator Hanson; I've only got three minutes left! But I'll quickly detour and say the other problem is that these electric cars don't even help the environment. They create 70 per cent more carbon emissions than the construction of an internal combustion vehicle. Yes, over time, potentially they can become carbon neutral or carbon positive, but in our electricity system, being coal dominated, it would take an average Australian eight years to become carbon neutral—and then the battery would conk after that and you'd have to go get a new battery and start the process all over again. This is ridiculous. It certainly doesn't help the environment, but, more to the point, my major issue for Australians is that it doesn't help them with the cost of living.

The reason why your petrol prices are going up is because the rest of the developed world has taken a leave pass on developing their own energy resources. We now have given the control of our energy prices to the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and Russia, and they are determining the world price. Over the past few months, they have pulled back on their production and—surprise, surprise—global oil prices are back over $90 a barrel, with some suggesting they will get back over the $100-a-barrel level. That's why you're paying more for petrol. As long as we do not develop our own resources, we will be dependent on others. As long as we do not encourage oil and gas production in this country, we will pay more for petrol because the other petrol produces, like Saudi Arabia and Russia, like the prices being high because they're massive exporters of oil and gas, and they will keep those prices high if we let them.

Once again, I applaud Senator Hanson for what she's brought forward here today, but the bigger issue is: are we going to gift our energy dependence to authoritarian regimes when we have so many resources here in this country ourselves? There is no reason we cannot become self-sufficient in oil and gas again. Just 20 years ago, we were. We had the Bass Strait going gangbusters. Senator Hanson is exactly right about the oil and gas resources in this country; there are enormous reserves. But we need to encourage people to invest in it. We need to support those businesses who risk billions of dollars of capital to do so. It would be nice to hear the government in their response to this bill say they do support oil and gas jobs, they do want to see Australia become energy-independent again and aren't going to obsessively put all our eggs in one basket and rely on Australians having to spend thousands of dollars on foreign-made electric cars.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand to support the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Domestic Reserve) Bill 2023. It's maybe not that often that Senator Hanson and I agree, but, when it comes to the need for Australians to get a fair deal on how our gas is used, I support this. This has been a failure of the major parties for decades, allowing our resources to be shipped overseas and not benefit Australians to the extent that they should. There are many examples of countries that have done this better than Australia. Take Norway, for example. It is sitting on a $1.9 trillion sovereign wealth fund. That's because they recognise these are our resources and that we should use them to set ourselves up and to set our children up for the future. That's not the path that the major parties have taken in Australia, and it's no surprise that the Independents and minor parties, who rely on being connected to the people they represent, are pushing this parliament to change our ways.

The gas industry has been incredibly successful in convincing Australians that we need more gas. That is wrong; we need to make sure that Australians get a fair deal for the huge amount of gas that we have. At the moment, we're exporting about 70 per cent of our gas and we use about 10 per cent of our gas just to liquefy the 70 per cent that we then export. We export 25 times more gas than is used in all Australian homes and yet Australian households are paying international prices to use our own gas—to use Australian gas. They're getting price gouged because there hasn't been a government from the coalition or Labor that had the foresight or the courage to actually do something about this.

Not only are we paying international prices but we're getting dudded on the return from the sale of these valuable resources. Once we dig coal, oil or gas up, or get them out of the ground and ship them off, they're gone. That's it. We should be getting more for them. Last year, LNG exporter earnings nearly doubled to an eye-watering $93 billion in just one year. That's nearly double the amount we spend on defence just in earnings from exported gas. Obviously, this translates to record profits: windfall profits topped $40 billion last year alone. That's about four times as much as the federal government spends on all government schools across the country. And that's just in extra profits for already profitable companies.

With that huge increase in the revenue and profitability of gas companies, it's safe to assume that significantly more resource rent tax is paid. Wrong again! Offshore energy producers have not paid a single cent in in the petroleum resource rent tax, ever—not a single cent! That's deeply embarrassing for a country that exports so much LNG. The weak—and I would say 'cowardly'—change to the PRRT which has been proposed by the government is not going to solve this problem. It will simply bring forward what offshore LNG will pay in PRRT for our own gas. We have a government that wouldn't even go with what their own Treasury suggested! They picked the weak option: 'Let's not upset the gas cartels, the ones who are making windfall profits off a war that no-one planned for. This wasn't in their investment plans, but let's be nice to them. We don't want to upset things.' This failure to get Australians a fair share from our resources is unjustifiable in the light of the current cost-of-living crisis. The costs of housing, energy and groceries are all skyrocketing and it's not good enough to say, 'We can't help with the cost-of-living crisis,' while allowing gas companies to make record profits.

On housing: according to the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation, we need $290 billion over the next 20 years to build an additional 800,000 social and affordable homes across the country. On energy: Rewiring Australia tells us that $12.5 billion would electrify Australian homes so that every household would save over $5, 000 a year on their energy bills.

On biodiversity: our leading ecologists tell us that to actually end extinctions, to halt extinctions, as the Labor government has pledged and promised to us to do, we need to invest nearly $2 billion a year, if we are to ensure that the schoolchildren who come through this place have the opportunity to see things like a greater glider or koala in the wild, a bettong, a quoll—unique Australian wildlife. We are not spending that much, because we have a government that cries poor, that says, 'Oh, the budget is so tight; we've got debt.' At the same time, they are not willing to listen to their own Treasury about how to raise more income from our own gas being shipped off overseas. Australians have some of the highest income taxes in the developed world. Tax experts are telling us that we need to diversify our tax base if we are to continue to invest in things like health care, education and the NDIS.

Australia has a huge quantity of gas, more than enough to meet the needs of Australian households, businesses and industry that rely on it, and we have more than enough to meet the needs of our transition. Now is the time to make sure that Australians are prioritised ahead of the vested interest of large and largely foreign-owned gas companies.

Yesterday I helped launch the climate of the nation report, a survey of over 2,000 Australians across the country. It shows just how out of touch the major parties are when it comes to climate. Seventy-five per cent of Australians are concerned climate change will result in more expensive insurance premiums. They are right; they're seeing them. We are seeing insurance premiums across the country go up. Particularly in places like Queensland, we're seeing them skyrocket, and households are having to find a way to pay for that. Yesterday I met with a former mayor and businessman from Lismore who was talking about the fallout from the flooding in Lismore and just how difficult it was to get your insurance company to pay. But going forward, there are now large areas that are uninsurable.

Seventy-five per cent of Australians are concerned about climate related disruptions to supply chains making it hard to buy necessities. If you turn on the news, you will see climate disasters around the world. That has an effect on agriculture, on manufacturing, on the food and goods that Australians use and consume. Australians are concerned climate change will result in droughts and floods affecting crop production and food supply, and more bushfires. Someone like Minister Watt would know more than many of us about these risks, having talked to farmers, having seen what's happening in disaster readiness in the country. This is an enormous challenge for us. It's going to take more investment from the government. It is going to take a co-ordinated response to protect Australians and that takes money. We have an opportunity here to raise money from largely foreign-owned gas companies exporting our gas. I would urge the government to have the courage to take them on.

Seventy-eight per cent of Australians agree climate policy should be based on best-practice climate science. Seventy-four per cent of Australians aged between 18 and 24 support the government stopping the approvals of new gas, coal and oil projects. Again, we've been hoodwinked by the fossil fuel companies that are aided by the major party politicians, who roll out their talking points about the need to expand the fossil fuel industry against the advice of climate scientists, against the advice of the International Energy Agency and against the common sense of seeing the effects of climate change and knowing that we are in a very deep hole. When you are deep in a hole, you stop digging. We have a government that wants to continue to dig. The consequences of that are very hard to think about.

Seventy-four per cent of Australians support the concept of a polluter-pays tax for businesses based on how much they pollute. Again, people know that this is going to cost money. When your home is uninsurable, who are you going to look to? When we have whole towns flooded or burnt by bushfires the government is going to have to step in. Where does that come from? We have an opportunity to raise funds from the export of our fossil fuels in the transition, yet the major parties don't want to talk about this. They don't want to do it.

Sixty-six per cent of Australians support a windfall profits tax on oil and gas. We've seen this happen across the world. Countries have said: 'You didn't plan for this. These are our resources. We're going to tax your windfall profits and put them into paying down the debt and into climate adaptation.' I note that experts in the adaptation field are saying that Australia needs to be spending in the order of $3 billion to $4 billion a year if we're going to be ready for what is coming. And we have what? A $200 million fund. It doesn't cut it. We need more funding. Yes, funding is tight, but here's where you can get some money to fund the transition and to fund adaptation to climate change that is already locked in.

Seventy-six per cent of Australians agree that climate impacts should be considered by the environment minister when approving fossil fuel projects. It's laughable that we don't do this. I've introduced a duty of care bill that will ensure that the environment minister, those with delegated responsibility and those in other portfolios that oversee fossil fuel projects have to consider the impact on young people and future generations. We must be looking after young people. We must be making longer term decisions, not the short-term thinking that's all about how the major party gets re-elected at the next election.

Fifty-six per cent of Australians say that opening new gas, coal and oil projects will make it harder for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. We know this. We're already off track and yet we continue to expand the fossil fuel industry and continue to cut down native forests for woodchips, paper pulp and box liners—and this is at a loss. We're subsidising the destruction of forests that are valuable carbon sinks.

Three times as many Australians think fossil fuel companies should pay the cost of responding to climate change than think the burden should be borne by those facing climate change impacts. That makes sense to me. Seventy-two per cent of Australians think that government agencies should not employ individuals who are also employed by companies and organisations that could be affected by their advice. Sixty-six per cent think that governments should be responsible for checking the accuracy of net zero and carbon zero claims of companies.

Really importantly, we see the effect of lobbying and advertising by the fossil fuel companies. Australians overestimate coal industry employment as a proportion of total employment by a factor of 33—people think there are 33 times more people employed by the coal industry than there actually are—and it's worse when it comes to gas. They think it's 69 times more. This comes down to advertising, to lobbying and to the major parties who just read off the hymn sheet of the fossil fuel companies.

Debate adjourned.