STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator BELL (New South Wales—One Nation Whip) (13:19): Today, Australia is dealing with a fuel crisis of Labor's making. Let us be clear about that from the start. This is a crisis and it has been caused by the Albanese Labor government, because this is a crisis that has not come out of nowhere.
This is not a crisis that Labor can wave away with excuses, or spin, or blame-shifting, or by saying that anyone who rightfully points out that this is their fault is unpatriotic, because this is the result of years of failure. First, Labor failed to prepare. And they were warned about the vulnerability.
They were warned by Senator Hanson. They were warned by Barnaby Joyce. And then they failed to act.
When very predictable conflicts, which we are exposed to through our supply chains, occurred overseas, they failed to act then as well. And we warned them. Barnaby Joyce warned them.
Senator Hanson warned them. For weeks, they pretended there was no crisis. They relied on insults and spin and on saying that criticism is not patriotic.
Well, that is a joke. Now Australians are paying the price. Australian families are paying the price, homeowners are paying the price and Australia's farmers are paying the price, because people depend on affordable and reliable fuel to get to work, to run their farms, to move freight and to keep family budgets afloat.
And now those people are suffering very real pain. That is the truth of this crisis. Labor failed to prepare this country for a risk that they were warned about, that they knew was real.
They failed to ensure that Australia had the resilience to stand on its own two feet. They cannot pass the buck or point to others, because those others were warned too. Senator Hanson and others, for decades, for years, have warned that this was a very real problem.
And Labor failed to act when they had the chance. They failed to make sure that Australia has the resilience to stand on its own feet. They failed to protect domestic refining capacity.
They failed to strengthen reserves, to get them to where we knew they needed to be. They failed to ensure that this country could supply itself and support its own people when the pressures came on. These failures, again, did not happen overnight; they were years and years in the making.
And, again, we warned them. Senator Hanson warned them. Barnaby Joyce warned them.
Labor were warned that Australia was becoming too dependent on imports. They were warned that our refining capacity had been allowed to wither. They were warned that our national resilience had been weakened.
They were warned that, when a crisis hit, ordinary Australians would carry the burden. Labor ignored those warnings. That is why this crisis belongs to Labor.
They had all the time in the world to prepare, and they did not. And when they needed to act, they did not. And now, what are Australians going to get from Labor?
Half-baked rushed solutions, temporary fixes, more talking points and more insults. They're blaming Australians for purchasing too much fuel, saying, 'Oh, this is a crisis of Australians,' not a crisis caused by the Labor government. That is the pattern with Labor: they ignore the root causes; they ignore their failures; they neglect the long-term damage that they have caused.
Australians can see through that, because the underlying causes of this crisis are much deeper and they flow on from the obsession that this Labor government has with net zero. It is their obsession with net zero that has left Australia too dependent on imported fuel and has let Australia's capacity to refine its own fuel be run down. This is from Labor's long-term net zero agenda.
And this is a very long-term agenda—years. They have only made this crisis worse through their policy. Through their obsession with net zero, they have weakened the very capability of this nation to prepare, to defend ourselves and to be self-reliant.
They have pretended that this failure, which has caused the dependence on foreign nations that we now have, is progress. Well, it is not. Now we need to have a very real discussion about whether Australia is still capable of doing the basic things a serious country should be able to do—to prepare, produce, store and supply, and to protect its people—because, under this Labor government and their net zero obsession, we can't.
This crisis has Labor's fingerprints all over it. They need to own this, because they've failed to prepare and they've failed to act. And now they must accept the consequences.