The Voice debate is now over and, given that, it’s time for the government to listen to the Australian people about how they are struggling right now with the cost of living, with high prices for almost everything, with higher interest rates and with maintaining their ability to service their mortgages.
I was out at prepolls over the last couple of weeks, and I listened to voters coming in to vote on the government’s Canberra Voice. Many people raised the issue of how much petrol costs right now. I don’t think it’s a good enough answer for a government to say, ‘It’s totally out of our control. We can’t do anything for you.’ It’s especially not an acceptable answer given that, when the Prime Minister was opposition leader and he was trying to get support from the Australian people, he made it known—and he certainly suggested to the Australian people—that he could do something about it. At multiple times on the campaign trail in the last couple of years before the election last year, the Prime Minister attacked the government for the high prices at the time, which were about $1.70 to $1.80 a litre. Wouldn’t it be great to go back to those days? He was out there complaining and pinning it on Scott Morrison, the then Prime Minister, and blaming him somehow for those high petrol prices. Now that he is the Prime Minister, he’s washing his hands of it completely. He’s Pontius Pilate now. He can’t do anything about it—’It’s got nothing to do with me. Go talk to somebody else.’ It’s deceptive to the Australian people for Anthony Albanese to have acted in that way and to suggest that he could do something about petrol prices and then, once people supported him and voted for him, to completely walk away from any of those statements or problems. I also think it’s incorrect.
There are things that we could do—admittedly things that may take time to benefit the Australian people—to restore a degree of independence and self-sufficiency for our country when it comes to our energy needs. That’s what should be the focus of any Australian government. In a large landmass like we have in Australia, there should be a concerted effort to keep ourselves independent for our energy needs, to establish energy independence and, in fact, to establish energy abundance. We should have an abundance of energy available to us in this country, and not be beholden to the dictatorial regimes of Russia and Saudi Arabia, who are principally responsible for the recent increases in petrol prices. There is no doubt—and I accept what Senator Wong was saying—that there are international factors here. What’s happened in the last few months is that Saudia Arabia and Russia have got together and restricted the supply of oil to the world. Our dollar has fallen. I think it’s partly a lack of confidence in this government’s financial merits that’s contributed to it falling. Those factors have made a difference, but why do we sit back and say that there’s nothing we can do about that?
We’ve got a massive country. Our best geologists say there are a trillion barrels of oil in north Western Australia. Just 20 years ago, we used to produce enough raw petroleum to service almost all our needs, with 96 per cent of our needs met by our own petroleum production. In the past few years we have lost two oil refineries, despite efforts—the coalition government kept the two we’ve got left; they were kept alive. The former coalition government was putting money into fuel storages around the country, to make sure we had more than just 35 days of reserves of our net import needs.
These are things we should be doing, and principally we should be supporting our oil and gas industry to invest in oil and gas fields in this country so we can break the control that Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC countries have over our nation and over the wallets of Australian consumers. We should be investing in those industries. Instead of that, the government, in their first budget, cut over $50 million to support finding new discoveries of oil and gas across Australia, including in the Beetaloo basin. A few months later they put massive new regulations on our oil and gas industry, which has meant that $1 billion of investment in a new gas field in western Queensland has been paused and frozen for almost a year now.
These are the things the government could do to help, but instead they are telling you that there is nothing they can do. Apparently there is nothing they can do to help you. Well, they should be doing what they can. They should be making an effort here to help Australian consumers with the high price of petrol, with the high price of fuel, especially given that they made those promises on the campaign trail.
There is a limited time here where we can do these things, because it will take a long time for those investments to pay off. It’s important for the government to listen to the Australian people now. All they’ve been wanting to talk about for the past six months is the Voice. It’s time for them to listen, because Australians are hurting, Australians are doing it tough, and they deserve a government that actually has a plan to do something about it.
