ADJOURNMENT
Senator BLYTH (South Australia) (20:05): It's clear Australia is facing profound challenges. We should be under no illusion. This is the most dangerous strategic environment since the Second World War.
Wars have returned to Europe and the Middle East, and tensions in the Indo-Pacific continue to rise. Instability persists across Burma and parts of the South Pacific. Global trade routes are under pressure, and energy markets are once again being weaponised by conflict and geopolitical rivalry.
The era of a global rules based order, at least as we understood it for most of the post-Cold war period, is over. For decades, Western nations have assumed economic integration would naturally produce stability and cooperation. Instead, we are witnessing the return of hard geopolitics.
Trade is increasingly weaponised. Supply chains are used as leverage. Energy markets are manipulated for strategic advantage.
Strategic competition has replaced strategic cooperation. The world is becoming more transactional, less stable and less predictable. Despite what sections of the modern political class would like us to believe, the world still runs on fossil fuels.
When instability threatens the Strait of Hormuz, Australians feel it immediately. Fuel prices rise, freight costs rise food costs rise, and the cost of running a business rises. Global instability does not remain confined overseas; it arrives quickly at the Australian kitchen table.
Australia currently relies on fossil fuels for more than 90 per cent of our energy needs. Our agriculture sector depends on diesel. Our freight networks depend on diesel.
Mining, manufacturing, transport and heavy industry all depend on cheap, reliable and abundant energy. Modern economies do not function without it. Modern defence forces certainly do not function without it.
Ships, aircraft, armoured vehicles, logistic chains and critical infrastructure all run on fuel, yet Australia remains dangerously exposed. We have only two ageing refineries. Our domestic fuel reserves remain well below recommended emergency levels.
The International Energy Agency recommends at least 90 days of strategic fuel reserves, and Australia is nowhere near that position. A serious nation should never place itself in a position where its economic stability and defence readiness can be threatened by supply disruptions thousands of kilometres away, and yet that is precisely where poor policy, complacency and ideological energy thinking have left us.
Resilience matters. A country that cannot power itself cannot properly defend itself. A country that cannot manufacture critical goods or secure essential supply chains is not truly sovereign.
A country that undermines reliable energy before viable alternatives exist is not just pursuing environmental responsibility; it is gambling with national resilience. This is where economic policy, energy policy and national security policy converge. For too long, Australia has treated them as separate.
They are not. The decisions we make about energy directly affect the cost of living, industrial competitiveness, investment confidence and defence preparedness. Businesses across Australia tell me the same thing repeatedly: they can only absorb rising costs for so much longer before those costs have to be passed on or investment stops altogether.
Farmers are facing soaring input costs. Tourism operators are seeing international demand weaken as global travel costs rise. Manufacturers are struggling under energy prices that would have once been unthinkable in an energy resource-rich nation like Australia.
Australians are working harder while feeling less secure, and at the same time governments have become increasingly tempted to believe they can centrally direct economies through regulation, intervention and bureaucratic management. But prosperity has never been created by overregulation or government micromanagement. It is created by enterprise, by innovation, by risk taking and by productive industry.
The Liberal Party remains the party that understands this. We remain the party of economic discipline, national resilience, free enterprise and strategic realism. That means rebuilding sovereign capability here in Australia.
It means backing affordable and reliable energy, and it means strengthening domestic manufacturing and critical infrastructure. It means ensuring Australia retains the industrial capacity and skilled workforce necessary to sustain itself during periods of significant disruption.