THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH MARK LEVY, 2GB

Thursday 26 March 2026

Topics: Fuel supply in Australia; conflict in the Middle East; One Nation.

E&OE……………………………………

MARK LEVY: Andrew Hastie is joining us on the line right now – the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the lower house and the Shadow Minister for Industry and Sovereign Capability. Andrew, good morning to you.

ANDREW HASTIE: Good morning to you, Mark, and your listeners.

MARK LEVY: Mate, I just want to play you something at the start of our chat here, and I know you might get dragged away because of divisions and the like. We took a phone call in the first hour of the show from a woman by the name of Anna, she's a single mum. It's heartbreaking and she demonstrated what every day Australians are feeling right now. I just want you to have a listen to what Anna had to say to me earlier this morning:

*EXCERPT PLAYS* 

It's just a joke, it really is. I had to drive my kids to their sports carnival today, and I was just panicking, driving past five different fuel stations with no fuel, thinking, what do I do if there's no fuel? What if my kids get sick and I can't pick them up? I've got no family help, I do everything on my own, and I'm sitting here every day thinking, when is Albanese going to announce: I'm going to cut the fuel exercise, I'm going to somehow do something for all of us."

MARK LEVY: So Andrew, that's Anna. She lives at Croydon Park in Sydney. The Prime Minister is her local member in Grayndler. She's getting no support from him, not as a local member, and certainly not as a Prime Minister. And Anna is one of millions of Australians who are really doing it tough right now.

ANDREW HASTIE: I really sympathise with Anna. A lot of Australians out there are doing it tough, particularly who rely upon their car to get around, particularly with young children. I know that a lot of people are worried long term, if this continues, about having to choose between food and getting their kids to school - she mentioned the doctor. There are all sorts of issues here. So yes, the Prime Minister has to lead. He's not doing a good job of leading, and that's why we've been focused on demanding a plan from him and his Energy Minister, Chris Bowen. They say that all the shipments are arriving in this country, yet we've got over 500 service stations which have run dry. The government's job at this point is to identify where people are hoarding or where there's informal rationing, establish where those bumps are and smooth them out across the economy so that our distribution networks are working for the Australian people – for people like Anna.

MARK LEVY: We shouldn't have to wait for another national Cabinet meeting on Monday, surely?

ANDREW HASTIE: No, this is a really serious time, and the Prime Minister, if he was leading, he would call a National Cabinet. That's why we federated in 1901, because we were worried about a crisis – a national crisis. So all the colonies came together, formed states and a country. This is an international crisis. Iran has globalised the war, they've globalized the Battle of Hormuz, and we are affected, because we're right at the end of the supply chain, and 90 per cent of our fuel is imported. So we are in the gun, and we've got to have a plan, and the Prime Minister doesn't have one.

MARK LEVY: You just heard Anna say there, why don't why doesn't he cut the fuel excise? Why isn't the Opposition seizing on this? Isn't that the logical option staring us all in the face? There was a precedent back at the height of the pandemic from the Morrison Government that cut the fuel excise. Isn't the government double dipping at the moment with not only the fuel excise, but the GST on top of that as well?

ANDREW HASTIE: All options should be on the table, and I'm open minded about that, because it was Scott Morrison who cut the fuel excise by half when Russia invaded Ukraine, and that impacted oil supply across the world as well. Fuel prices went up as a consequence, and it was targeted and temporary relief for six months. So there is a precedent, and all options are on the table. Our focus is on the Australian people, on people like Anna, who are doing it tough. People have been smashed for the last four years with inflation, right? Regular Australians – low-income, middle-income Australians – they've had their purchasing power reduced, and now when they see fuel prices spiking up to $3 a litre for diesel, it's frightening and –

MARK LEVY: But from an Opposition's point of view – and you're an alternative government here you can, you can really take it up to the government and corner them and say: this is what we think should happen, and we want you to jump on board, and that is to cut this fuel excise. Because, you know, we've got a GST applied to the final pump price, which already includes the excise, so the 52 cents doesn't change, but the GST does. Pauline Hanson seized on this, she's saying, the government's making an extra $300 million a month at the moment on the GST, on fuel. That's $300 million a month going into the government coffers. All the while, we've got people like Anna working out whether or not she's got enough money to put fuel in a petrol tank.

ANDREW HASTIE: That's right. Well, look, all options are on the table. The problem is: this government is not being transparent. They keep telling us the shipments have arrived, yet we have 500 petrol stations across the country that have run dry. They have the information, they'd be modelling the supply chains, they'd be modelling when the global supply shock actually hits us hard, which is apparently sometime around mid-April – late April – and they're not even being transparent. We have to use Question Time to find out which service stations around the country have closed and how many by state. This is a government that is not being transparent, and if you don't have the information, it's very hard to make decisions. So our task is to get them to the table – and all options should be on the table, by the way, including a fuel excise cut.

MARK LEVY: You know what really angers me, Andrew, when I watch Question Time just as a keen observer, the smugness that's on display from Chris Bowen, who gets up there – and you guys are putting genuine questions to the energy minister, the man who's responsible for this – and the response is: "I refer the Honourable Member to my previous question." I mean, isn't that the ultimate slap in the face to the Australian people when your job in Opposition is to ask the questions that we're entitled to answers on?

ANDREW HASTIE: Absolutely, that's your job. That's why we have question time – it's an hour and 15 minutes of accountability every single day. The minister has three minutes to answer the question – three minutes. They often go off track, so we have to make a point of order and bring them back to the question. But what we've seen this past week is Chris Bowen sitting down and not answering the question, and that's why we've been saying: you're all done, mate? Thirty seconds in and you're done?

MARK LEVY: I must be missing something, Andrew, and you've been in politics long enough to maybe work this out for me. How the hell is Chris Bowen still a Minister of the crown? Everything he touches is a disaster!

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, you're not wrong there. I'm not going to argue there with you, Mark. A lot of people want change. They want change, and it can't come quick enough. Our job at the moment is to just force the government to come up with a plan that looks after people like Anna.

MARK LEVY: Alright. Well, if we want to change the government, I think you're going to need the assistance of One Nation, through preferences and the like, to get rid of this Labor government. I know Pauline Hanson's in the paper today saying she's happy to work with you guys all of a sudden. Are there any discussions happening behind the scenes between the leadership of the Coalition and those in One Nation?

ANDREW HASTIE: I've always had a respectful relationship with Pauline; I've got no quarrel to pick with Pauline. But One Nation – they're out to tear us down. There was an article yesterday in the Australian Financial Review where James Ashby – her chief of staff – said: "we've got to get rid of all the old players and start afresh," and he was talking about the Coalition. So, this is a contest – I want to win, I want to deliver good centre-right government for the Australian people. What we saw on the weekend in South Australia was a cannibalisation of the South Australian vote, which just empowered Labor to deliver more Labor government. I'm happy to work with anyone, but if it's a competition, I'm going to fight hard because I believe the Coalition can deliver a better government than the Labor government.

MARK LEVY: But see, it's tricky, Andrew, because you don't want to fall into that trap where you're going after One Nation. Because all that does is it just fractures that centre-right vote even further and the real enemy here for yourself and One Nation – I would have thought – is that Labor-Greens alliance. We can't afford as a country to have another one, two, three terms of a Labor government, which is surely why the Coalition needs to work with One Nation together to try and oust this Labor Government. Am I right or wrong there?

ANDREW HASTIE: Yeah, absolutely. But like I said, I'm not trying to pick a quarrel with One Nation. There's a lot of good people in One Nation, and I want to win their vote back. But One Nation have very clearly said that they want to take our votes off us, so it's a competition. I think what we need to do is come up with a vision and better policies, and we're doing that. We're out of Net Zero – we're going to kill Net Zero, and we're going to get this country going. Cheaper power prices for families, small businesses and industry. We're going to cut immigration and insist on higher standards. And we're going to look at ways of making the economy work for working Australians who have been smashed by inflation, they've been smashed by the expansionary monetary policy of the RBA. A lot of Australians have no hope of ever buying and owning their own home – that's got to change. That's all on the table.

MARK LEVY: And one thing we need to do is get back to standing on our own two feet, Andrew. The amount of resources we have available to us in this country. I mean, there's a story in the papers in Sydney today about oil – why we're not refining our own oil. We've got these large amounts of oil that we don't use yet. We've got two refineries – we did have six – is that something that would change under a Coalition government?

ANDREW HASTIE: All options are on the table, and I said this yesterday at the Australian National University in a speech. I said, we should be looking at all options about recovering our refining capacity – that includes using techniques like coal to liquid. You could use our coal, which we have an abundance of, to make crude oil, and then turn that into jet fuel and diesel. That would give us a level of self-sufficiency, so that in the event of a war, we could stand it on our own two feet. At the moment, we don't have that option, which is why we're so we're so vulnerable and people like Anna, they're hit hardest. This is Donald Trump's choice, by the way. I've been pretty tough on Donald Trump over the last week, because it's people like Anna who gets smashed. And I should remind you that One Nation has been pretty strong in supporting Donald Trump's war – that's not a point that's made very often, but I want to make it to your listeners today.

MARK LEVY: You don't support the war?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, I didn't get a choice. Australians didn't get a choice. We weren't briefed, it just started, and now we're dealing with the consequences. And, you know –

MARK LEVY: But, Andrew, doesn't that fall back on the politicians in this country that haven't prepared us for what was inevitable – this conflict in the Middle East?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, we didn't know it was inevitable.

MARK LEVY: Oh, come on, Andrew, you've been around long enough to know what was happening in the Middle East. This was always going to happen. There were, there were warships being mobilised –

ANDREW HASTIE: Sure, we saw the military buildup. But I think what has happened here is that President Trump thought he could go in and win the war in a week. And right now, Iran has the world economy held to ransom, and people like Anna are suffering as a consequence. I'm not going to send young Australians to die in a conflict that we don't know an end state to and there's no clear strategic objective.

MARK LEVY: Who do we believe here at the moment? Because we've got the United States saying one thing, we've got Iran saying, nothing's happening, there's no talks. Is there an end in sight for this war? How long do you envisage this war to go on for?

ANDREW HASTIE: Iran, after Operation Midnight Hammer in June last year, dispersed a lot of their missiles and drones. They decentralised authority, especially for this moment – if their regime was decapitated, they could still fire missiles. And they've been firing missiles at the Gulf states, at ships, and that's closed the Strait of Hormuz. And then, of course, Donald Trmp, when he came out, he said that this is about changing the regime. So the regime is going to fight to the death, because they know that if they give up, they're finished. And so it's a real strategic pickle that we're in. My vision for this country going forward, Mark, is that we're self-sufficient with our Defence Force – we can fight and stand on our own two feet – and we have enough refining capacity, and we use our natural resources so that we're not caught out again if this ever happens down the track.

MARK LEVY: Alright, well, keep taking it up to the government in Canberra, because there are a lot of people hurting. You heard Anna's call, and I'm getting call after call after call on this program, Andrew, from people that are saying: government, Prime Minister, you have to do something. And I think the start is to cut that fuel excise. Andrew Hastie, I appreciate your time as always.

ANDREW HASTIE: Thank you, Mark.

[ENDS]