Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief No. 2) Bill 2026

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (13:06): Resources rich, politically poor—that is Australia in 2026. We are arguing the merits of the Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief No. 2) Bill 2026. The opposition is not going to stand in the way of consumers getting a cheaper tank of fuel, even if it is only $11.

We are not going to stand in the way of people, particularly in regional Australia, being able to fill up and get about their daily business. During the early stages of the fuel crisis, when Iran was first being bombed, there were regional people who were choosing whether or not to stay at home, whether to take the children to their weekend sport or dancing or whatever the case might have been.

We heard from the government, over and over, that supply was not an issue. Well, I can tell you it was. In Batlow, in my electorate, there was no fuel available.

There were many farmers—it was the start of sowing season—who could not access diesel to sow their crops, to plant their winter crops so that they would have a harvest at the end of the year. And there were farmers who could get some access to diesel but they could only half-fill their tanks and, inexplicably, they had to pay cash for it. That goes against every measure of fair play.

It's probably an issue that should have been raised with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. This was the reality of life in regional Australia when the Strait of Hormuz was initially blocked. This was the lived experience.

I suspect this government doesn't care all that much about farmers. They do care about polls and polling and pollsters. They do care about making out as if they're doing the right thing by Australians, hence an extension to the fuel excise rebate, but at a smaller discount.

The federal government is winding back its discount to the fuel excise over the next month—the 32c per litre fuel discount is dropping to 16c per litre—and the heavy-vehicle road user charge will go up from free to 16c per litre. Motorists have had three months of relief, as they should have. The coalition called for this and brought the Labor government kicking and screaming to the table to do what we'd asked and to do what our constituents said was important so that our farmers could plant their crops and so that our regional families in particular could take their children to sport and other activities they enjoy.

I don't think city people always get the fact that we drive far greater distances. In the fortnight away from parliament, I was averaging about 400 kilometres a day just travelling around my huge electorate. I could throw my handkerchief over the electorates of some of these city MPs and still have room to spare.

They just don't understand the hardships faced by their country cousins. If they did, they'd do more to protect the transport sector and the trucking industry, just as one example. ASIC figures show that of trucking companies in 2021-22—remember, Labor took over in May 2022—196 went to the wall in that period.

In 2022-23, 347 went broke, with 495 the following year, and, as of 6 April this year—so the figures are a little bit dated, but the argument remains the same—535 insolvencies had already been recorded. That's Australia's transport, postal and warehousing sector. That's our truckies.

Without our truckies, nothing gets anywhere in this country. When the trucking sector grinds to a halt, so does the nation. We should be ever so thankful that our truckies do a mighty fine job for and on behalf of this nation, because no food gets on the table of anyone in Australia without a truck.

It doesn't. They're under the pump. XL Express, with a fleet of 193 vehicles, stood down its 200 employees, and, a couple of months later, creditors vowed to wind up the 17 companies associated under the XL group.

It was burdened by debt. It shows a worrying, alarming and growing trend in Australia. We had the Don Watson Transport and Coldstores group, after 77 years of delivering in Australia, in trouble such that it announced it was finishing up.

This company's collapse meant another 300 employees were out of work—140 trucks and 170 trailer trucks annually covering 22,000,000 kilometres. They're not isolated examples. Ron Crouch Transport in Wagga Wagga has been going for a long, long time.

It's a generational family trucking business. This is due in no small part to the issues around fuel supply, the issues of the cost-of-living crisis and the issues of getting business done. The issues of false and sham contracting is playing a big part as well.

The government will say it's doing some work in this space, and I commend it for that, but there's much more that can be done, that should be done, that must be done. Discounting petrol, helping out some small degree, will go a little bit of the way, but this government has the levers by which to pull, to manage, to control and to do a lot more in the economic space to help particularly regional Australia.

I think it gets forgotten in this place that regional Australia keeps the lights on. It gets neglected in this place that regional Australia ensures that food gets delivered and put on the table. When every Labor member tucks their knees under the table three times a day, every day, they should be mindful of that.

They should be well aware of where their food comes from. But I don't think they are, because, if they were, last week they wouldn't have been spending, as our debt spirals towards $1 trillion, another $430 million buying productive water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. That might well be another story altogether, but that equated to 86 gigalitres, the equivalent of 34,400 Olympic-size swimming pools, taken out of the productive consumptive pool and flushed down the mouth of the Murray.

And for what? For the environment. We heard the member for Kooyong just a minute ago praising the Labor government, as though we should all get down on our knees and say: 'Oh, thank you so very much for the Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief No. 2) Bill 2026!

Thank you, oh great ones, for providing this relief!' I have a different view. I have a very different view to the teals. They're arguing at the moment about whether they should become a party or not.

They've been a party ever since they got in here. When you get funded by Simon Holmes à Court and you take money from that billionaire, when you have the same policies, when you have the same talking points, when you meet in your caucus together and you've got the same colours, you're a party. Don't ever think that you're not, because you are.

They come in here and give almighty praise to Labor as though they're doing something in this space. Then the member for Kooyong started to talk about the need for more EVs. That's all well and good, but I'll tell you what—out in regional Australia, they don't cut the mustard, because they don't go far enough.

I've had example after example of companies that went into the electric vehicle space and then their employees were stranded and couldn't get home in time because either somebody hadn't put sufficient storage in the battery or, for whatever reason, they came to a town where they didn't have the charging points. It's all well and good for these city MPs. They've got blinkers on and always have had.

They don't know about the hardships of regional Australia. There were none of them around the table yesterday when I had a group from the southern basin of the Murray-Darling here talking about how tough they're doing it. There were no city Labor MPs looking into the tear-filled eyes of those people who grow our food, listening to their stories of how they're paying more and more for water.

And, yes, those farmers will see that there's a little bit of relief here. But I'll tell you what—they should be getting it, too. They deserve it.

They deserve every bit of help we can give them. I'll tell you what the government shouldn't be doing, and that's continuing to go into the Murray-Darling Basin and buying water out of the productive consumptive pool. They should not be doing that, but they won't stop, even though we've got a nation in crisis, heading towards a trillion dollars of debt.

What really galls me in this place is when the Treasurer goes to that dispatch box and talks about the trillion dollars of debt that Labor inherited. It is a fallacy. ABC Fact Check says so.

It says it is a fallacy. It says it's not true. And yet he continues to spout this misconception that Labor inherited a trillion dollars worth of debt.

It was nowhere near that amount. I'll tell you what we did during COVID—we saved lives and we saved livelihoods. What did Labor do at the time?

They wanted us to spend more and more money. JobKeeper was put in place by the member for Kooyong before this one. He wasn't a teal.

He was a coalition member and a good one. That JobKeeper saved businesses. It kept the doors of business open when businesses across the world were going bankrupt, were going out backwards.

The Johns Hopkins centre rated Australia second in the world for COVID preparedness for the number of lives we saved—tens of thousands of people who would, but for our assistance, not be alive today. We kept them alive and we kept their businesses going. But the debt that we're now faced with, grappling with and struggling against?

That's on Labor's watch. It doesn't help matters when they want to go and spend $430 million buying productive water and doing what with it? Flushing it out of the mouth of the Murray.

How is that good economics? It is not. We're not going to oppose this, because we want to see relief at the bowser.

We do. But the other things that Labor are doing are only going to push the price of groceries up. We want to see our trucks being able to go up and down the busy byways and freeways and little country roads, that last mile to the farm gate.

We want to see people paying less at the cash register in the grocery store. That just makes for good economics. It also makes quality of life much better.

At the moment, there's way too much homelessness. There are way too many people suffering because of the cost-of-living crisis brought about because of the poor economics of this Labor government. I started by saying we are resources rich, and we are, but we're politically poor, and we are.

We've got resources underneath our feet. We wouldn't have to go down this path if we bothered to dig them up, if we bothered to drill, if we bothered to have a policy whereby we not only extracted our own energy and fuel but refined it and used it for our own sake instead of importing all of our energy. We should be smarter than that.

We are smarter than that. We have to be smarter than that for the sake of ourselves, our children and our children's children.