This motion is a reflection of the complete failure of the Greens to get anything right on energy and also the complete embarrassment that was COP27 for the Greens political platform. Quite clearly, over the last couple of weeks, there has been no agreement among the countries of the world to get rid of or phase down—whatever you want to call it—fossil fuels. The headline in the Guardian online paper was ‘Draft Cop27 agreement fails to call for “phase-down” of all fossil fuels’.
With this motion, the Greens are now trying to sneak into this chamber a decision that wasn’t even taken at the climate conference. Why should Australia do something that other countries are not committed to do? Other countries are moving away from phasing down fossil fuels; the language in the agreement from this year’s COP is more open to fossil fuel development than it was in the agreement from last year at Glasgow. That is because the rest of the world has woken up to the fact that we need coal, gas and oil to have a functioning modern economy and to feed ourselves.
One thing that must be stressed in this debate is that, in a few months time, by the end of this year, Australia will no longer produce urea based fertilisers. Urea fertilisers are the most commonly used fertilisers in Australia. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, of which urea is one, are the most commonly used fertilisers in the world. In fact, nitrogen based fertilisers feed around half the world’s population right now.
Synthetic nitrogen based fertilisers come from natural gas. If we don’t have natural gas, if we don’t produce natural gas, we won’t be able to feed half of the world’s population. That is how the world works. They are the real facts. The rest of the world has found that out over the past year when Russian gas was denied to European manufacturers. They have had huge issues with producing fertilisers and that has sent fertiliser prices through the roof right across the world and has sent food prices up. That has fed into inflation, as we’ve seen right around the world, causing untold suffering, especially in poorer countries.
Here in Australia it is a travesty that we no longer will produce urea fertilisers. We used to be reliant on China, but they banned the export of them a few years ago. We will be reliant on the Middle East to grow our food rather than taking care of it ourselves. But we have plenty of gas resources in this country. We are just denying ourselves the use of them. We’re not supporting them. This new government has scrapped funding for the development and exploration of new gas in the Beetaloo and the Cooper basins. We need to get back to supporting our country and our people. The rest of the world has worked out that you actually do need fossil fuels, not just to make things but to do the very simple things in life, like feed oneself.
The other thing this motion demonstrates is how wrong the Greens have been on energy over the past few years. I’m old enough to remember a few years ago Greens senators in this place saying that there’s no market for coal, there’s no future for it and no-one is going to make any money out of it anymore. That was their prediction. The prediction was there would be no business case to invest in fossil fuels. They have been wrong on that—fantastically wrong—and now they’re trying to use the laws to ban people from investing in these projects, to stop them, even though there is a very strong economic case for Australia to invest in coal, oil and gas. You just have to look at our trade data.
People may not realise that over the last 12 months king coal has re-emerged. Coal has been re-coronated. It is the nation’s biggest export once again. The biggest export from Australia over the past 12 months has been coal. It overtook iron ore in the last couple of months. For the last 12 months we exported $130 billion worth of coal. It alone is about a quarter of our merchandise exports, so one in every four dollars of exports from our nation come from coal. Iron ore is about $120 billion, so it’s very important. Gas too is sitting just shy of $80 billion now. Together coal, gas and oil account for 40 per cent of our nation’s merchandise exports—a massive amount of wealth for our country and indicative of how much demand there is for Australia’s high-quality fossil fuels.
In that environment we should be increasing our production of those commodities. When the price of something goes up and demand goes up, we should respond to that and increase our fossil fuel production. We should help the free world especially overcome aggression from Russia and provide its own food and energy needs. This Greens motion would make us weaker and more dependent on dictatorial regimes that mean to do us harm.
