JOURNALIST: Matt Canavan’s speech today?

MINISTER MADELEINE KING: ... I guess we'll just have to wait a couple of hours to see it. But this Government has always supported using more of our resources. A Future Made in Australia is exactly what we've been saying, we should make more things here, and that's why we've been investing in critical minerals, the further extraction, but also refining and processing in green metals, you know, on the West Coast and the East Coast. We’ve saved Mount Isa, we've made sure that Whyalla Steel Works keeps surviving, we've secured the futures of the two oil refineries. So you know the Government of the Day has the runs on the board, and I guess we'll see how the Leader of the Nationals wants to copy that. 

JOURNALIST: What about when it comes to oil specifically? Australia does have oil resources, but a lot of them are just stuck in the ground. What about them? 

MINISTER MADELEINE KING: Well, there are a number of discoveries at Dorado, the discovery off the West Coast is really important. But it depends on commercial development and investment, so they're more than welcome to go through all the approvals process, and they're important for community support and social licence. And I know the Taroom Trough is the topic of the day at the moment, and that's a really important known gas province. And drilling is underway to see if they can get to the apparent oil. That's about three kilometres, so these are the challenging geologies, no reason to not keep exploring them, absolutely. But in this country we do rely on private investment in ‑ and have done for many, many decades ‑ into assessing those ‑ the viability of those projects and getting the commercial support for them. As they come to Government for approvals, of course we assess them, and we'll assess them under the new and improved reforms and the environmental protections. 

JOURNALIST: We are, of course, as well seeing the importance of Australia's gas exports specifically. There's been a lot of chatter, particularly in the online space, around taxing our gas exports more. Is that something that the Government is open to? 

MINISTER MADELEINE KING: Well, the LNG exports for this country are vitally important, especially at a moment where 20 per cent of the world's gas supply's been cut off during ‑ because of the conflict from the Middle East, and that's the gas out at Qatar. Australia, therefore, remains one of the, if not the most reliable supplier of LNG to our Asian neighbours in particular, and that is really important. It's something that's reflected in the Future Gas Strategy of our Government from a couple of years ago. You know, we are implementing the Australian Domestic Gas Reservation System, we're going through a development phase with that. So there's a lot going on in the industry. And I want to thank the community, but also the industry, for participating in the development of those policies. Any extra kind of policy thoughts will go through the processes of Government, and I'm going to leave it to those processes, and I'm really not going to pre‑empt any decision of my Cabinet colleagues or the Treasurer. 

JOURNALIST: Doesn't it put us in a better position though? I mean we're the ones with the leverage here, given that Qatar is sort of out of the loop now, you know, people are relying on us. Doesn't that give us even more of an incentive to tax it more because people will probably buy it anyway? 

MINISTER MADELEINE KING: Well, I guess you could think of it like that, but the way I would think of it is it's really important to be reliable and constant and consistent, and so what ‑‑ 

JOURNALIST: I think we already know that we are. 

MINISTER MADELEINE KING: ‑‑ what we have is an industry that, I know there's been lots of commentary about what the industry gives to us or produces for Australia. Well, one it produces our own energy security, gas security. We could only have the domestic gas production that we have now with the investment of who we export to. Without the $80 billion investment in the Chevron position or the $80 billion worth of investment by IMPEX in Queensland ‑ sorry, in the Northern Territory ‑ and the many billions of dollars of investment in Queensland, we wouldn't have the domestic gas we have now. So it's really important to respect that investment that is made over many decades from exploration to production and construction in the middle of that. So there's a lot goes into a gas industry, it's not simple, it's so far from simple. And so any reforms to the industry are as equally as complex as the industry themselves.