Shadow Portfolio — 30 March 2026

The Manager of Opposition Business, Mr Tehan, used two back-to-back parliamentary interventions on 30 March to prosecute a single, disciplined attack: the government's response to the national fuel crisis was not only inadequate but deliberately delayed, and the Opposition had forced its hand.

On the procedural motion to suspend standing orders for three fuel-crisis bills, Mr Tehan signalled Opposition support while embedding a sharp critique — the government had taken more than one month after the Iran war began to bring emergency legislation to the House [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s030]. He held up the process itself — advance briefing of the Opposition, proper deliberation — as the standard the government should apply to all bills, and called on the Prime Minister to apologise to Australians for what the Opposition characterised as a complete failure of government leadership [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s061].

The procedural framing was deliberate: by endorsing the parliamentary process while condemning the government's tardiness, the Opposition positioned itself as both cooperative and principled — supporting legislation it claims to have compelled.

That argument carried directly into the second-reading debate on the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Amendment Bill. The Opposition announced it would support the bill but move two sets of amendments. The first would expand EFA's mandate to include commercial account lending for oil, diesel, petroleum, coal and gas — not merely transactions through the national interest account.

The second would modify the EPBC Act to streamline environmental assessment pathways for fuel-supply infrastructure in national emergencies, which the Opposition characterised as removing impediments introduced by Labor and the Greens' EPBC reforms [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s038].

The substantive attack in the second-reading speech sharpened the cost argument. Mr Tehan contended that the government acted only after the Opposition called for a halving of the fuel excise the previous Friday, and that the days of inaction between Friday and Monday had cost Australians an additional $50 million in excise revenue [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s038].

He anchored this in a specific prior-government decision: a statement of expectations issued to EFA last year directing it to avoid financing oil, gas and coal projects — a direction the Opposition argued was ideologically driven and operationally incoherent given that diesel powers approximately 50 per cent of the nation's energy and underpins fishing, farming and mining industries [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s038].

The two interventions cohere as a coordinated strategy. The procedural motion gave Mr Tehan the platform to set the political frame — belated crisis management, leadership failure, Opposition initiative — before the bill debate allowed him to translate that frame into concrete legislative proposals. The amendments to both the EFA mandate and the EPBC Act serve a dual purpose: they are substantive policy positions on fuel security, and they force the government to either accept Opposition-drafted provisions or publicly reject expanded fossil-fuel financing and faster environmental approvals during an active national emergency.

The records do not indicate how the government responded to the proposed amendments.