A few weeks ago the Prime Minister could not say what the price of petrol was. No one expects the PM to have to fill up his own tank, but he would from time to time be driven around our streets. It was strange that he had not noticed the big, green, neon signs that have a 2 in front of them again.
People are already struggling with interest rates, power prices and the surge in petrol prices is taking many families to the edge. In the Senate this week, the Government was asked what it was doing to help families with the price of petrol.
Their response was that it is providing subsidies for the purchase of electric cars. Even with these generous taxpayer handouts, the cheapest electric car in Australia is $40,000. How can a family that is struggling to pay the $120 bill to fill up the car, going to be able to afford a whole new car at those prices?
I have nothing against electric cars. They are fun to drive but they are expensive and they are no solution to families already struggling with the cost of living.
And, by the way, electric cars are also not crash hot for the environment. Because they contain much more heavily processed metals, electric cars create about 70 per cent more emissions in their construction than a traditional internal combustion car. The average Australian needs to drive an electric car for more than 8 years before it would actually lower carbon emissions.
So what can help bring down petrol prices? The answer is simple. Australia, and other western countries, need to produce and refine more oil.
Australia used to do this.
Just 20 years ago Australia was almost self-sufficient in raw petroleum production. We produced 96 per cent of our needs, mainly off the coast of Victoria. But the Bass Strait has run dry of oil and now we produce less than half of our raw petroleum needs.
Just 12 years ago, Australia could refine 742,000 barrels of oil a day, meeting almost three-quarters of our oil needs. Since then five Australian oil refineries have shut and now we can refine just a quarter of our oil needs. There are just two refineries left in Australia, in Brisbane and Geelong.
Despite our net zero commitments, and electric car subsidies, Australia still consumes 1 million barrels of oil per day. And our consumption has barely changed over the past decade. What has changed is that we are now reliant on other countries to meet those needs.
And global consumption of oil has been rising. In July this year global oil demand hit 102.5 million barrels a day, surpassing the record set in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic. So much for net zero.
Increasing consumption and declining production in developed countries has meant that our petrol prices are increasingly dictated by Saudi Arabia and Russia. In recent months, they have decided to cut back production, creating global oil shortages and making you pay more for petrol.
There is no need for us to hand over the control of our energy security to these dictatorial regimes. Australia remains an unexplored land of resource riches. Our best geologists at Geoscience Australia estimate that there could be 1 trillion barrels of oil in north Western Australia. Not all of this will be recoverable but there could easily be enough there to rival the oilfields of Texas.
The Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory could also contain liquid fuels and it is Australia’s first producing shale basin.
When the LNP were in Government we funded exploration of our resources to find out what we have, and to try and attract the commercial investment that could recreate our energy independence.
The new Labor Government scrapped these initiatives in its first budget and instead funded tax concessions for electric vehicles. These concessions are only useful to rich people who pay high taxes. Poorer Australians struggling with the price of petrol have been offered nothing by the new Labor Government.
Australia developed the Bass Strait on the back of generous support for offshore drilling from the Menzies Government. This support attracted the world’s most renowned geologist from America, Lewis Weeks, and he immediately identified the Bass Strait as the place to drill.
We need to help support a new era of oil discovery if we want to provide any cost of living relief to Australian families. The demand for oil is going nowhere so if we do not increase the supply to match, the price of petrol will just keep going up and up, whether the PM notices it or not.
