THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS KENNY, SKY NEWS

Monday 16 March 2026

Topics: Fuel security; conflict in the Middle East.

E&OE……………………………………

CHRIS KENNY: Let's go now to the Shadow Industry and Sovereign Capability Minister, Andrew Hastie, who joins us from Western Australia. Good to speak to you again, Andrew. Very keen, in the current climate, to get your analysis of our lack of energy security. Just bouncing off what Joel Fitzgibbon said there – there's a former Labor defence minister, no less – effectively saying a lot of these billions of dollars we've wasted on green schemes could have been funding more refining in this country, which would obviously boost our economic and national security.

ANDREW HASTIE: Good afternoon, Chris. That's exactly right. If you look at Labor's energy and industrial policy, they are two sides of the Net Zero coin – Labor's strategic objective is decarbonisation and hitting Net Zero. When you study the documents – as I did today – and you look at the Future Made in Australia Bill, which is about apparently re-industrialising Australia, it actually precludes the use of crude oil, gas or coal in future projects. In fact, rather than a Future Made in Australia, Labor's policies are a future made overseas. That doesn't protect us in a geopolitical crisis, which is what we're experiencing right now in the Middle East, and if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for an extended period of time, we're going to really feel the pinch. What we want to see the Albanese government do is come out with a plan to mitigate a long-term closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

CHRIS KENNY: Now this hasn't snuck up on us, this has been a vulnerability that's been, sure, growing increasingly bad, but it's been developing over decades. You'd remember, of course, very well Jim Molan calling this out a decade ago. We can't undo, what's been done, obviously – the shutting down of refineries in this country and the massive investment in renewables – but what can we do quickly enough in the future?

ANDREW HASTIE: I want to acknowledge the late Jim Molan - a great man, a great patriot – and he and I worked closely on this back in 2018. I made a recommendation as the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee for Intelligence and Security that the Home Affairs Department and the Energy Department actually do an investigation into our liquid fuel security, which they did. Jim supported me a lot there – he's a good man and we miss him a lot. But the big picture here is we are in a new stage of history. We're undergoing a massive rupture, and I think Australia is exposed. It's time now that we undergo a period of re industrialisation, where we secure our prosperity and our way of life. There are just some things that you can't put to market, the government has to take care of and I think we've gone from eight refineries down to two, and that's put us in this position right now. Now we can point the finger at people in the past, but that doesn't get us anywhere – we've got to be future focused. I think Prime Minister's Ben Chifley, the Labor Prime Minister post-World War Two, and the great Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Menzies – both of them in the post-war years underwent a period of sustained industrialisation of the Australian economy, and that's something we've got to look at right now and into the future so that we don't get exposed to these geopolitical shocks.

CHRIS KENNY: We have enviable amounts of energy in this country when it comes to uranium, coal and gas. Is there anything more we should be doing? Of course, we should be producing more energy through reliable means – be that coal or uranium – but is there anything we can do in the gas or oil exploration field so that we are actually more independent when it comes to liquid fuels? Even if we had more refining, of course, we're still exposed to sea lanes being closed to get that crude to us.

ANDREW HASTIE: That's right, there's no point having refineries if you're dependent on crude oil from overseas. You've actually got to have crude here in Australia and there are opportunities. There's Beetaloo Basin, there's obviously the Bass Strait, there's Project Dorado about 140 kilometres off Port Hedland. There's a fair bit in the ground and we've got to make it economically viable for people to drill, extract and then refine that in this country. Labor's Net Zero obsession has pretty much ruled that out, which is why a lot of people are going offshore – big companies are going offshore to look for energy elsewhere. We could be an energy superpower. To quote the Canadian Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, he said today, Canada could have strength at home and immense leverage abroad. The same is true of us here in Australia – we could have great strength at home and leverage abroad with our abundance of energy that we have in the ground.

CHRIS KENNY: Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's an incredible ongoing case of national energy self-harm. You talk about the current energy crisis, but this is about as tame as it could get for us, because the slowing of crude out of the Strait of Hormuz for two weeks in any sort of sizable conflict in the Middle East or in our region, we could be exposed to more dramatic cuts in supply lasting a lot longer. Yet already, I paid $2.70 almost for diesel on the weekend. Tell us what you think is going to happen in coming weeks when it comes to both price and supply.

ANDREW HASTIE: There's a cost-of-living issue and there's a fuel security issue. Cost of living we're already experiencing. Before the war in Iran started, inflation was at 3.8 per cent – Australians were already doing it tough under a big spending Albanese Labor government. Things are about to get a lot tougher, and we're seeing that with the fuel prices Everyone's going to be impacted – households, small businesses, heavy industry, are all going to be impacted by a price spike because of what's happening in the Middle East. And then there's the larger issue of fuel security. If the Strait of Hormuz closes for an extended period of time, we're exposed. Twenty per cent of the world's oil and gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and it goes to places like Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, which is where we get our oil from. We're exposed, and that's why the Albanese government has to come up with a plan to mitigate the risk of a long-term closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

CHRIS KENNY: Yeah, it is a deep worry, and they can't say they weren't warned. Thanks for joining us, Andrew, I appreciate it.

[ENDS]