Wednesday, 19 November 2025

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (18:19): (2149) My adjournment matter is for the Premier, and I ask her to advocate to the federal government to stop ConocoPhillips progressing their oil and gas drilling projects in the Otway Basin. The US fossil fuel giant ConocoPhillips has started drilling at the Essington-1 well in the Otway Basin. Drilling at a second well, Charlemont-1, is scheduled to begin in December. The fossil fuel corporation breezily says:

We are hopeful that we will find natural gas from these two prospects to support Australia’s domestic gas market.

They wilfully ignore that Australia already produces far more gas than is needed for domestic use but that most of that goes to export and that demand for gas in Victoria has been steadily decreasing. Shamefully, Labor lets these gas corporations peddle their lies and drive dangerous climate change, all while wrecking our precious marine environment. The Otway Basin drilling project is incompatible with the science, which tells us that we need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and cannot open new projects. It is incompatible with Australia’s climate goals and meeting 2035 and 2050 emissions targets. It is incompatible with Victoria’s legislative requirement to achieve 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035. Why on earth is the government allowing it to proceed?

This project will worsen climate impacts, which are already costing us all. The cost of natural disasters in the first half of 2025 was reported as hitting $2.2 billion nationally. Gas exploration will devastate our marine environment as well as threatening the liveability of our planet through enormous emissions. It involves seismic blasting, which turns vast swathes of our oceans into dead zones. For what? For a bunch of polluting gas that we do not need and that the industry admits is unlikely to add additional supply to the market within the decade. The Australian Energy Market Operator has underlined that gas use in Victoria is going down due to the combination of electrification of residential energy, people reducing their expenditure to address the cost of living, and decreasing gas consumption by commercial and industrial users.

So let us be real: this is gas that will destroy our climate and our oceans. It is fossil gas that we do not need now and well and truly will not need in 10 years time. This has nothing to do with the public good in Victoria: it is all about gas industry profits. Labor needs to stop the gas industry taking Victorians and Australians for a ride and killing our planet while they do it. Premier, if your Labor government believes in climate action, you should be doing everything in your power to stop ConocoPhillips gas drilling off Victoria’s coast.