Shadow Portfolio — 30 March 2026

The Member for Riverina, Mr McCormack, used debate on the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Amendment (Strategic Reserve) Bill 2026 to mount a wide-ranging attack on the government's handling of fuel security, framing the issue as a cascading national emergency with a hard seasonal deadline. He acknowledged the government's fuel excise halving and road user charge relief but argued those measures fail to address the structural problem: regional Australians cannot reliably access diesel at viable prices.

Diesel prices of $4.25 per litre in the Northern Territory and $3.30 per litre in his own electorate have forced farmers onto cash-only half-tank fills, with fuel stored under lock against theft [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s077]. The core of his intervention was a tightly argued security cascade: without guaranteed diesel access before end of April or early May, the current sowing season collapses, producing a food security crisis by harvest time in October–November and, by extension, a national security crisis [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s077].

That framing — fuel to food to national security — is a deliberate escalation of the political stakes beyond the energy portfolio.

Mr McCormack also questioned whether the Fuel Supply Taskforce Coordinator, Anthea Harris, can effectively discharge her mandate while simultaneously carrying responsibility for the Water Act review and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy role. The capacity concern is a secondary line of attack: even accepting the government's institutional response, he argued, the person responsible is structurally overloaded.

On the bill itself, he pressed for oil, gas and coal to be explicitly included in the government's deliberations and regulations under the strategic reserve framework, calling for reversal of Export Finance's prior mandate to exclude fossil fuels. He anchored the case in import dependency data, asserting liquid fuels constitute 50 per cent of national imports by weight plus a further 10 per cent in petrochemicals [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s077].

As a supply-side alternative, he cited Southern Oil Refining in Wagga Wagga and Northern Oil Refinery in Gladstone — together converting used oil into 70 million litres annually — and called for upscaling of those facilities alongside exploration of tyre and plant-matter conversion as a path to fuel sovereignty.

In separate procedural contributions, Mr McCormack turned to the housing crisis, citing construction insolvency data as the central indictment of government economic management: insolvencies have risen from 351 in 2020–21 to 1,567 in 2024–25, driven by cost escalation, labour shortages, and constrained land supply [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s135]. He linked housing affordability directly to the cost-of-living and cost-of-doing-business environment, pointing to a coalition election plan centred on council support and multi-level government coordination as the alternative [TA-260330-house-326949c748de:s135].

The connection between the two streams of activity is coherent: both the fuel security intervention and the housing insolvency critique frame the government as having failed to translate announced measures into conditions that work for regional Australia and the building sector. Mr McCormack also used a separate contribution to condemn sovereign citizen behaviour and commend New South Wales police, a community-facing intervention with no direct policy content but reinforcing a law-and-order posture.