'Running on empty'

How Labor is turning fuel security into another Net Zero scam under the banner of 'national security'

Despite decades of warnings, Australia has been exposed to an incredibly dangerous situation.

We have 20-ish days of fuel security, much of it hosted offshore, and all of it draining away as war escalates in the Middle East.

As for a backup plan? That doesn’t exist.

'In a time of conflict, this government is running a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude.

‘There is no need to panic-buy petrol…’ insisted our reckless, over-spending Treasurer, Jim Chalmers.

Chalmers was simultaneously trying to blame the war in Iran for his dodgy budget accounting while pretending there’s ‘nothing to see here’ with the fuel situation.

Prime Minister Albanese’s Energy Minister, who has forgotten about carbon emissions, backed Chalmers’ comments, insisting that panic buying would ‘just make the situation worse’.

It’s impossible for Australian taxpayers to make the fuel situation ‘worse’ after successive Labor and Coalition Unitparty governments left us in a catastrophic position. We import 90% of our liquid fuel - this includes our requirements for domestic transport, industry, agriculture, and military defence.

To save money on storage, the vast majority of these imports come as ‘just-in-time’ deliveries.

Even the fuel we import from Asia is sourced largely from the Middle East - and we can expect China to lean heavily on this supply now that its import network is severely disrupted after what happened in Venezuela, Iran, and the wider Middle East.

Other nations are forced to rely on dicey international transit routes, and Australia has chosen to do the same. This is a monumental political failure.

Over 20 years, six of our eight refineries were closed or substantially wound down with ‘competition from Asia’ cited as the reason. Two of these critical refineries met their demise under the watch of the then-Energy Minister Angus Taylor, who now seeks to present himself as the salvation of conservatism.

At the time of ExxonMobil’s decision to close the Altona refinery (constructed in 1946), Angus Taylor said this ‘will not negatively impact Australian fuel stockholdings’.

This was simply wrong. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.

Successive Coalition-Labor governments have sold Australia’s national security off to free up cash in the budget or because they could not be bothered to argue the case of national security when it mattered.

We still have minimum reserve supply rates, which are designed to buffer against natural disasters and temporary disruptions - they are not satisfactory for extended periods of global conflict nor do they make provisions for the fuel-guzzling behaviours of our geopolitical partners. This means that earlier war-gaming by the government, which insists Australia can buy its way out of a shortage, lack the real-world probability that nations will protect their own needs above our contractual arrangements.

It’s a cold, hard reality that if Australia were to be cut-off from its fuel deliveries, the wheels of our nation would fall off in early April.

A 2018 report commissioned by the government suggested Australia maintain domestic refinery capabilities. It did not foresee simultaneous disruption to Asian, Middle Eastern, and South American fuel markets. It did not foresee conflict zones and regime changes in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. It did not foresee the largest refinery in the Middle East going up in flames, or Iran deliberately targeting the entire energy structure of its neighbours. And it did not foresee the oil politics taking place between Russia, Ukraine, and neighbouring nations such as Hungary.

In other words, the government report failed to properly gauge future risk and assumed a world that no longer exists.

…even after US President Donald Trump gave everyone the hint with his, Drill, baby, drill! push to bolster domestic supply.

As the Maritime Union of Australia said earlier this week:

‘This is not a distant geopolitical drama, but a direct threat to Australian workers, families, and industries. When a fifth of the world’s oil moves through a single maritime corridor and that corridor is shut by war, the consequences are immediate.’

It’s in this environment that our party leader, Pauline Hanson, put forward a proposal for an immediate inquiry into fuel security. To this we would also request full transparency on how long it would take and how much it would cost to construct domestic self-sufficiency in fuel refineries.

These are things we need to know.

And what did Labor and the Greens do?

They voted it down.

They put party politics ahead of Australia’s security and your future survival.

Their dislike of Pauline Hanson, who they wasted time censuring for a second time, overrode their responsibility to the people of this nation. This is the type of politicking that must end.

While we take fuel security seriously, there is evidence mounting that Labor and the Greens intend to use public panic as a means to prop-up their dying ‘Net Zero’ industry.

The Climate Catastrophism narrative has well and truly worn off, with most Australians - and nations around the world - realising that it was a scam designed to line the pockets of mining operations and foreign energy companies with public money. A lot of politicians found very rich private sector jobs after legislating in favour of all things ‘green’.

Now, ‘national security’ has become the next unquestionable buzz word that can be invoked by the Prime Minister, Treasurer, and his Energy Minister to justify another pivot toward decarbonisation.

The outrageous propaganda is already starting.

News.com.au ran a story at the beginning of March, Why your next car is a matter of Australia’s national security.

It was one of many pieces caught up in the ‘EV to save us from the Iran war’ frenzy.

If you wouldn’t drive an electric car for yourself, would you do it for your country? Conflict in Iran is a stark reminder: an EV is more than a personal choice - it’s a matter of national security. Choosing an EV makes you, me, and our wider community less reliant on fossil fuels.

The Australian Electric Vehicle Association also put out a press release: EVs have always been about fuel security. Really? I thought they were about ‘saving the world’?

AEVA argues that the full electrification of transport remains the single most effective strategy the nation can enact to improve fuel security.

Of course, there is no explanation as to how relying on communist China - which uses Middle Eastern oil to build EVs and Middle Eastern diesel to ship them to Australia - solves any of our problems.

Nor is there a reliable answer to the transport industry, which is incompatible with electric trucks. And there isn’t even a faint ‘nod’ to where China sources the materials for the construction of our renewable grid - those being volatile African nations which operate under a mixture of debt-trapping and despot corruption, abuses of human rights, and traversing regions of the world prone to terrorism and war.

Even if we were to replace our domestic fossil fuel energy grid with solar, wind, and batteries - there is nothing more vulnerable in a time of conflict than a giant solar industrial complex or thousands of kilometres of transmission lines running through undefended forests and open ocean.

Strategically, it’s madness.

In reality - it’s impossible.

Yet attempting to achieve this lunacy is a ‘national security’ narrative with which the Prime Minister and his mates will likely try to appease the Greens.

The Greens have come out in open defiance in recent weeks and their voters will see it as an ideological victory and anti-war protest. Their support will join huge corporations already gorging on taxpayer dollars and unions protecting Net Zero-inclined funds.

Money and opportunism are about to hijack public fear over the war to revive the Net Zero industry.

And it will do so at the expense of Australia’s national security.

One Nation believes this to be one of the most dangerous fake news narratives an Australian government has ever sold. A short-sighted, selfish political move that could leave Australia open to a very real logistic catastrophe.

We call on the entire Parliament to put fuel security at the top of the agenda, and to restore Australia’s energy grid to self-sufficient network as a matter of urgency.

One Nation will immediately buy whatever supplies we can obtain in the market, which the Albanese government is still not doing. Then we will work with fuel companies to get new oil refineries in Kurnell and upgrade the Lytton plant in Brisbane, and Geelong in Victoria.

We will immediately start construction on gas-to-fuel plants and legislate a domestic gas reservation so we have cheap Australian gas to convert to fuel. We will build the missing link in the national gas network - a pipeline to connect the East coast and West coast gas networks.

This violation of national security can never be allowed to happen again.