This bill should be opposed because it’s only going to add to the cost-of-living pressures that all Australian families face. Most of these types of bills these days have, in parentheses, some misleading statement about the bill. This one is called, in mundane terms, the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Fight for Australia’s Coastline) Bill 2022. That should be amended if we are to be truthful to the Australian people to say, ‘higher petrol prices for all’ bill because that’s what this would lead to. I don’t know about other Australians but I did a lot of driving over the summer. It is eye-watering every time you fill up your tank and look at how much the bill is going to be. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford that but I cannot fathom how some struggling Australian families afford to just to fill up their car at the moment. It’s costing more to fill up the car than it does to fill up your trolley at the grocery shop. It is an enormous bill going to hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It would be very rare you get to fill up the tank and don’t have to put your pin in when you swipe your card because it’s always going to be over the minimum threshold. It’s very, very expensive.
How are we going to bring down petrol prices? How are we going to bring down the cost of living for all Australians? This bill doesn’t do it. It definitely will not do that. It will only put pressure on those petrol prices because it will tell us that we will produce less oil and gas. If you want to bring the price of something down, you have to supply more of it. We need more oil and gas exploration in this country to help bring down petrol prices for Australian families and also to help provide energy to the world, which is suffering under the jackboot of Russian authoritarianism at the moment.
The Greens obviously have not got the memo that net zero is dead and the world is walking away from the commitments to restrict fossil fuel use and production, and it’s doing so at a rapid rate. Just this week, the woke British oil and gas company BP has come out and backed away from its climate commitments. BP has been famous for progressively adopting over the last 10 years more and more stringent commitments to walk away from oil and gas. Indeed, a company that used to be known has British Petroleum has instead tried to get itself known as ‘beyond petroleum’ in recent years. This week BP actually came out and said, ‘No, it’s not ‘beyond petroleum’ anymore; it’s ‘back to petroleum’. They’re going back to petroleum because, as the Financial Review reports today in its headline, ‘BP dials back climate pledge amid soaring oil profits’. The article goes on to say BP ‘was revising its plan to lower emissions by more than 35 percent by the end of this decade. Its new target is a 20 to 30 percent cut’.’ Twenty to 30 per cent is a very big range for BP; it gives them lots of flexibility. The article mentions that BP, over the past year, has made $39.8 billion of profit. Shell has made $41.6 billion of profit; Exxon Mobil has made US$55.7 billion profit; and Chevron, $35.7 billion in profit. I don’t want to see those profits that high. That is bad for consumers, bad for the economy. Good luck for those companies; they made the investments. They would be laughing all the way the bank over their net zero commitments. They convinced the world not to approve competitors to the big oil companies.
The Greens have been the greatest enablers of oil and gas companies in history, because, by successfully shutting down alternative sources of competition to the incumbent operators, they have helped to boost their profits. But the way to get those profits down—do you know the way to get them down?—is not by taxing them and not by restricting oil and gas exploration permits, as this bill does. It’s by allowing smaller oil and gas companies to get into offshore petroleum areas and compete with these companies. That’s how to get the profits down. That’s how to get the prices down for consumers.
A lot of these companies—I’ve dealt with them a lot—are sometimes quite happy to, not publicly but behind the scenes, support bills like these. As I said, the Greens are the enablers of the incumbent large resource companies. These companies like to see some of these areas shut down because they don’t want to see new, innovative and nimble smaller companies come in and compete with them to supply scarce resources like oil and gas. That particularly goes to areas like PEP-11, where a small company here is trying to get a start. It’s not BP, it’s not Mobil, it’s not Chevron and it’s not Shell. Those larger companies are quite happy to see the Greens do their dirty work by restricting competition in this space and therefore keeping their profits higher than they would otherwise be.
The Financial Review article goes on to say that apparently BP is still committed to net zero. Yeah, right! I’ll believe that when I see it. It’s very easy to make commitments 27 years hence when, as we know, their 2030 target is now seven years hence and they’ve immediately dropped it. We’ll see what BP does in 2043 on this matter. I imagine that, if they’re still making $40 billion of profits a year, they will quickly revise their goals and objectives.
The other area that of course has got the memo on this is the European Union. They are at the forefront—on the front lines—of Russian aggression. They had naively and ignorantly become far too reliant on Russian oil and gas over the past decade, and the war in Ukraine has brought to a screaming halt the dreams and visions of green aligned parties right across Europe to deliver on net-zero emissions commitments. Over the past year, countries in the European Union have announced plans to build 18 new liquefied natural gas facilities. We have a kind of schizophrenia here, where we have some—
Debate interrupted.
