Fuel For
Australia's Future

Australia's EV fleet is currently around 3–4% of registered vehicles. Even the most aggressive transition scenario has us reaching 50% EV penetration between 2035 and 2040. EVs that don't exist yet cannot replace diesel today.

More critically, the crisis is a diesel crisis — not a petrol crisis. There are no commercially viable electric heavy freight trucks, no electric tractors at scale, no electric mining haul trucks. The electrification argument is almost entirely irrelevant to the emergency that farmers, truckies and miners are living right now. Australia actually has the highest rooftop solar penetration per capita in the world — achieved substantially during Coalition governments. The critique that Liberals never supported renewables is factually wrong.

This argument has more substance than the EV one and deserves a straight answer. The relationships between the Liberal Party and the resources sector are real and documented. Adam Watson doesn't pretend otherwise.

But consider: the CFMEU donated tens of millions to Labor while its officials were found to have engaged in serious corruption — and Labor governed for that union for years. Both major parties have donor capture problems. That is a structural issue with political funding, not a Liberal-exclusive failure. Mining employs tens of thousands of working-class Australians earning $150–200K without a university degree. Protecting those jobs is not governing for billionaires — it is governing for the workers who depend on those industries.

The standard critique of Liberal resource policy is exactly this: privatise the profits, socialise the costs. Adam's 50/50 model is a direct structural rebuttal to that critique.

The Commonwealth owns half of every refinery recommissioned. Half of every barrel drilled in Bass Strait. Half of all profits. Private capital does the heavy lifting — but every Australian shares the upside. That is the opposite of a Rinehart handout. The private partner can be Viva Energy, Ampol, or any qualified Australian investor — it does not have to be Rinehart. The model is open. The Commonwealth stake is non-negotiable.

Partly true — and Adam won't hide from it. Kwinana and Altona both closed under the Morrison government in 2021. That was a failure of sovereign thinking, and it has contributed directly to the vulnerability Australia faces today.

But Port Stanvac closed under Rudd. Clyde under Gillard. The refinery decline is a 15-year bipartisan failure across five prime ministers. Pinning it on the Liberal Party alone requires ignoring half the timeline — and it lets Labor off the hook for its own role in creating this crisis. Adam Watson is running precisely because the old way of governing — by both parties — has failed. The 50/50 sovereign model is the break from that failure.