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

Ms LE (Fowler) (16:31): We speak in thousands, millions and billions and percentages in this House. But at home it looks like something much smaller and much more human. It looks like a mum in Cabramatta at six in the morning filling up her car before the school run, the drive to her own mother's medical appointment and then work.

It looks like a young apprentice in Canley Vale watching the fuel light come on, working out whether he can make it to payday. It looks like a small-business owner in Wetherill Park with two vans on the road watching the bowser and deciding whether this is a good month or a hard one. That is who I'm speaking for today.

When the government announced in March that it would halve the fuel excise for three months, I welcomed it and so did my community. The cut from 1 April to 30 June made a real and immediate difference at the bowser. I was glad that the government finally listened to what I and the people of Fowler had been calling for.

Prices dropped almost straightaway, and workers, families, truck drivers and tradies right across western and south-western Sydney got some breathing room on a cost they simply cannot avoid. I do not take the relief for granted and won't play politics with something that helps my community pay their bills, but I want this House to understand why it matters so much more in an electorate like mine.

In Fowler, the car is not a luxury; it is survival. People in my community drive because there's no real alternative. They drive to work, often to jobs that start before the sun comes up or finish long after it goes down.

They drive to university and to TAFE, and they drive to care for the people they love. That is something we do not talk about enough in this place—the amount of unpaid care that happens in households across Fowler is absolutely dependent on those carers being able to continue to fill up their car. It is the daughter driving her elderly parents to the doctor.

It is the family getting a relative with disability to their services. It is one household holding up three generations. And almost all of that care happens behind the wheel of a car.

For these families, public transport is not a real choice. In my community a reliable public transport system is close to non-existent. Whether we are talking about buses, trains or metro, the services are too far apart.

The routes do not go where people actually need to go, and a shift worker cannot build their life around a bus that might not come. So my community drives, and then it pays again. They pay tolls, they pay registration and they pay insurance.

Put it all together, and families in electorates like mine are spending thousands of dollars a year just to get to work, to study and to look after their own families, not because they're doing anything wrong but because, in practice, there is no option. Mine is also a community where the majority of us speak a language other than English at home. It is a community built by migrants and refugees who arrived with very little, built businesses, raised families and asked for nothing more than a fair go.

They work hard, and they simply want a country and a government that works as hard for them. Let me turn to what this bill actually does, in plain terms. The three-month halving of the fuel excise is coming to an end.

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Fuel Excise Relief No. 2) Bill 2026 manages what happens next. Instead of letting the fuel excise snap back overnight, it reduces the excise and the equivalent customs duty on most fuels by 30.4 per cent below the normal rate. That relief runs from 1 July 2026 until the day before the next indexation date, which is currently expected to be 2 August 2026.

For petrol and diesel, that works out to about 16c a litre off the excise during that period. Now, 16c a litre might sound modest in this building, but, for a family filling up once or twice a week, it adds up quickly. And for a small business running vans, trucks or utes, it can be the difference between holding their prices steady or passing the cost on to customers who are already doing it tough.

I know that many businesses are trying so hard to hold back on passing on those costs to a lot of families who are their customers. I support this bill. It continues some of the relief that started with the halving.

It softens the next step, instead of letting families fall off a cliff edge. I will be glad to support it. But this bill is a bandaid.

It is a bandaid my community needs right now, and I recognise that. But it sits on top of a problem we have ignored for far too long. My community is asking me a simple question: is there a plan, or are we going to be right back here in a year's time doing all of this again?

Let me explain why we keep ending up here. People deserve to understand that. We cannot control everything.

We cannot stop a conflict on the other side of the world or control what happens to the ships that carry our fuel across the ocean. That is true. Here is what we can control.

We can decide how exposed our country and economy are when those shocks hit. Right now, we are far more exposed than we should be. We are the only country in the International Energy Agency that has never held the 90 days of fuel reserves we are supposed to.

So, when something goes wrong far away, the price at the bowser in Cabramatta moves almost straightaway, with very little standing between my community and that shock. The government has put aside $3.2 billion for an emergency fuel reserve. That is sensible, and I welcome it.

But it has put just $10 million into even studying whether we could rebuild our ability to make more of our own fuel—$10 million to study a weakness that has been growing for 20 years. That tells me we are still managing the symptom. We are not yet curing the cause.

I'll try and be constructive. I don't think it's enough to always point to a problem. My hope is that my solutions are considered and taken on board by the government.

There are two that I'm asking this government to take seriously. First, give us regular local buses—not a promise for 10 years from now but buses people can actually rely on soon. Give us a service that runs often enough so that a mum can, hopefully, leave the car at home or a student can get to TAFE without begging for a lift.

The Commonwealth already helps fund transport across Western Sydney through the Western Sydney City Deal and the projects around the new airport. I'm asking this government to sit down with the New South Wales government and fund frequent local bus services for the suburbs that people already live in. Buses can be running in months, not decades.

Every family that can leave their car at home is a family that can stop being held hostage by the price of petrol and, hopefully, can contribute to a cleaner environment. Second, give us an east-west rail connection. The Commonwealth is helping to fund an $11 billion metro to the new Western Sydney airport.

It runs from St Marys to the airport and to the new city of Bradfield, and that is welcome. But that line serves the new growth areas. It does not run through the suburbs my community already lives in—places like Liverpool, Warwick Farm, Cabramatta, Canley Vale, Wetherill Park or Fairfield.

Our rail network was built to run one way—into the city and back out again. It was never built to connect our suburbs to each other or to the new jobs out west. The case for an east-west rail link is not new.

It was identified years ago in the very studies that built the case for the city deal as one of the connections our region would need, linking the new airport through to Parramatta. But it has never been funded. It has been left as a line on a map and a 'some day' project while my community waits.

I will keep pushing for the New South Wales government and this government to stop treating an east-west connection as something for some day and to commit to it, because connecting people to jobs, to study and to each other is not a luxury. It is how a community gets ahead, grows and thrives. So I will press this government to make fairness for Western Sydney and south-western Sydney part of the deal every single time it puts money on the table.

Let me finish where I started, with my community. For too long, my community was treated as a seat that could be taken for granted. We were promised the buses, the trains and the investment.

It went somewhere else. So let me be clear about what the people of Fowler want. They want the same fair go that the rest of New South Wales already enjoys, to get to work without going broke, to care for their families without counting every kilometre and to know that the country they helped build is planning for their future, not just patching over their present.

I will vote for this bill and support it because my community needs the relief and I will never stand in its way, but I will keep asking the question it sent me here to ask: where is the long-term plan? The people of Fowler have fought hard for every cent of help they have ever received. They have earned more than another bandaid.

They need a government that will build them something lasting, a future that is more secure, more affordable and more connected. So I will not stop pushing until my community gets it, and I will keep fighting for that longer term plan.