Environment and Other Legislation Amendment (Fast Tracking Coal, Gas and Oil Projects) Bill 2026
Senator KOVACIC (New South Wales) (16:17): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum relating to the bill. Leave granted.
Senator KOVACIC: I table an explanatory memorandum, and I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard. Leave granted. The speech read as follows— We are rich by nature but poor by policy, our nation is full of natural resources.
Since their election, the Albanese Labor Government has legislated a series of changes to prohibit public funding, financing, or legal permitting, or equal regulatory treatment of fossil fuels. These changes are holding back development of oil, coal and gas projects. The Environment and Other Legislation Amendment (Fast Tracking Coal, Gas and Oil Projects) Bill 2026 (the Bill) seeks to reverse those changes across six pieces of legislation.
The Bill presents a set of near-term measures that we can announce that focus on unlocking our domestic energy resources, particularly oil, coal and gas, as part of a response to addressing the global and national fuel crisis; as well as to shine a light on Labor's persistent energy failures. Labor has done all it could to suppress the supply of oil over recent years, and now we are in an oil supply crisis.
It is clear environmental laws, particularly the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), have piled on costs and red tape while holding back our resilience as a nation because energy developments do not get approved or are delayed forever. This includes oil, coal and gas, but also renewable energy projects. We should want Australian oil as much as we want Australian critical minerals or Australian renewable energy.
If we don't get more oil, we will have to import more. Just as if we do not get more industrial-scale renewable energy, we won't get the data centres needed to support artificial intelligence. We need all forms of energy.
Australia is one of the most energy-rich nations on the face of the Earth. We have vast reserves of natural gas, coal, critical minerals, and liquid fuels. Yet, despite this extraordinary natural endowment, Australian families and businesses are being forced to pay exorbitant prices for basic electricity and fuel.
This is because under Labor, our policy framework has systematically made it harder to produce domestic energy. At its core, Australia does not lack energy resources; it lacks a government with the policy courage to develop them. This Bill is designed to reverse that failure and restore three fundamental principles to Australian energy policy: drill, build, approve.
This Bill will back Australian resources, unlock new supply, and deliver cheaper, more reliable power for households and businesses right across the nation. We cannot solve a fuel supply crisis by continuing to lock up Australian fossil fuels. Our focus must be energy abundance and energy security.
We are living through an energy and sovereign security crisis born of our own legislative making. The deeply unsophisticated domestic political debate on energy in this country—and a broken environmental law framework has guaranteed that 42 years' worth of Australian oil endowment remains locked underground. It is almost unbelievable how few lessons were learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about Australia's resilience and security.
Australia sits literally at the very end of global supply chains for the basic products that keep our economy, our transport networks, and our society afloat—energy being chief among them. In 2020, Australia was exposed because we could not get enough face masks. In 2026, we were exposed because we could not get enough fuel.
When international conflicts flared, Australia was left vulnerable because we lacked the fuel needed to run the country. We saw petrol prices surge by nearly 50 per cent—the highest increase in the OECD, and vastly higher than the 15 per cent average seen in nations like Japan and South Korea, neither of which possess a fraction of our natural resource wealth.
Why are we in this position? Because Australia has been operating on the naive assumption that everything will be okay and that the rules-based order will continue to function on autopilot. We have repeated the same mistakes now in the latest oil and fuel crisis due to conflict in Iran and the broader Middle East.
We've had the Prime Minister and the Energy Minister going cap in hand and begging for fuel. We hear government announcements about critical minerals, local manufacturing, and ambitious transition targets, but when a supply chain shock hits, we resort to a last-minute Band-Aid approach. These have turned out to be just announcements with little action.
We don't have a plan, and it is no way to run a country. We have repeatedly failed to prepare the nation for supply chain shocks. The late Senator Jim Molan warned this Parliament time and time again about fuel security.
Yet, rather than building national strength, recent policy has actively dismantled our sovereign capacity. Let us be completely honest with the Australian people: our economy is transitioning, but as we transition, we require plentiful, reliable, and affordable energy of all forms. The United States Government estimated that across six major basins in Australia, there are an estimated 403 billion barrels of shale oil, with 17.5 billion barrels considered technically recoverable.
From Queensland's Taroom Trough to the Browse, Northwest Shelf, and Barossa gas and condensate fields, Australia holds vast natural wealth. Yet our current economic model ignores our own natural endowment and relies instead on importing refined and unrefined fuel on ships from Asia. The Australian energy debate should not be an ideological culture war.
The truth is that we need energy of all forms. We need Australian oil and gas as much as we need, wind and solar energy. We need it all.
If we do not extract more domestic oil and gas, we will simply be forced to import more from foreign jurisdictions with lower environmental standards. Similarly, if we do not approve industrial-scale energy projects, we will not have the power needed to drive housing construction, rebuild domestic manufacturing, or power the data centres required for artificial intelligence.
A key handbrake on Australia's sovereign resilience is the EPBC Act. It takes seven or eight years just to obtain EPBC approvals for major offshore gas and condensate developments. In a competitive global market for mobile capital, delays of this magnitude guarantee that investment leaves our shores for the United States, South America, or Southeast Asia.
Environment Minister Murray Watt claimed that Labor fixed environmental laws for business. The reality is that the primary legislation was gutted, creating more uncertainty than ever. In a political backroom deal struck with the Greens, oil, gas, and coal ventures were explicitly banned from accessing fast-track approval processes, priority class declarations, and national interest pathways.
That deal was an act of economic self-harm. It undermined Australia's energy security by design. There was little or no analysis of the economic, energy and broader impacts of this deal.
Today, nearly 40 gas and oil projects sit bogged down in EPBC bureaucracy. But it is not just fossil fuels—around 90 renewable energy developments are similarly trapped in administrative gridlock. And some 80,000 houses are also stuck in this quagmire.
Bureaucratic paralysis harms every single sector of our economy. This Bill seeks to rectify this state of affairs. At the most basic level, federal environmental laws must protect our natural environment, but they must also promote the fundamental national security and economic interests of the Australian people.
What This Bill Achieves This Bill reverses those ideological exclusions and restores a level, merit-based statutory framework across six key Acts of Parliament. EPBC Act Reforms This bill amends the EPBC Act to remove explicit statutory bans, to be imposed by the Environment Protection Reform Act 2025, targeting fossil fuel actions by: providing streamlined environmental assessment pathways for resource projects; removing the restriction preventing the Minister from making exclusion determinations in respect of fossil fuel actions; allowing the Minister to declare a fossil fuel project a national interest proposal; allowing fossil fuel actions to be included in priority classes of actions for bioregional development zones, enabling the Minister to grant exemptions for fossil fuel actions in conservation zones, and allowing the Minister to declare a fossil fuel project as a priority action for national interest proposals that override bioregional plans; and repealing the standalone definition of "fossil fuel action" from the EPBC Act, ensuring all energy and infrastructure developments are assessed against standard, objective criteria.
Restoring Financing and Support Infrastructure In addition, statutory bodies are legally barred from providing standard commercial financing, export support, or research co-funding. This Bill repeals blanket prohibitions across key Commonwealth agencies by repealing: section 23C of the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Act 1991, restoring Export Finance Australia's ability to finance resource extraction, export infrastructure, and liquid fuel developments on standard commercial and strategic merit; paragraph 33(2)(b) of the Industry Research and Development Act 1986, enabling Commonwealth programs to co-fund research and technological innovation in coal and natural gas processing; section 10A, removing statutory bans on Commonwealth entities supporting fossil fuel extraction and related energy infrastructure; subsection 63(3) of the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Act 2023, opening NRFC commercial financing to major industrial gas supply, pipeline infrastructure, and resource processing projects; and paragraph section 421-55(3)(c) of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997,removing restrictions that disqualify clean hydrogen produced via coal gasification or steam methane reforming from receiving certified production tax incentives.
President, we owe it to current and future generations of Australians to ensure that our laws do not turn Australia into a weak, vulnerable, and energy-dependent nation. The changes in this Bill will ensure there is a fast-track approvals pathway for projects that are deemed of critical sovereign or national significance, meaning that the usual environmental standards would not apply.
Such projects would not be limited to oil and gas, but also relate to any critical projects, such as in housing and large-scale renewables. We need all forms of energy. Senator KOVACIC: I seek leave to continue my remarks later.
Leave granted; debate adjourned.