Plane travel can be replaced by very fast trains and where the distance is not prohibitive, tunnels!?

And where that is just not possible submersible nuclear powered roll on roll off fast ferries, which if provided as a Darwin to Singapore overnight service, would allow rapid rail to replace air in most of our Asian Economic trading partners.

As I understand it most of the most promising prospects in the GBR are the townsville trough, the plateau and the coral sea have already been surveyed, with the results withheld by the commissioning Federal government.

And if the only oil or gas there is limited to the townsville trough thought to contain 5 billion barrels, enough returned revenue to pay for the rigs and further confirming 3D seismic surveys, with could rely on naturally occurring almost constant geological activity for the results.

Some of the estimates I have read assume a middle east rivaling resource to our immediate north (the now locked up coral sea?) We've allowed the nay sayers to persuade us that the possible wealth from possible oil revenue can be replaced by tourists, who to a generic man are staying away in droves.

All while hundreds of farmers are literally going to the wall thanks to fuel costs from tractors, harvesters and transport.

Instead of a cash strapped government bleeding the motorist white with cascading fuel excise, why don't they use the brains they were born with and earn vastly more from our own possible and known reserves?

And who are they to decide this or that possibly promising reserve should be locked away!

Let the properly informed people decide!

And better than being entirely at the mercy of often hostile foreign suppliers and with just a week's worth of reserve to fuel our defense capabilities and domestic market!

We need the Federal government to release the results they hold without further delay and leave whether we do or don't lock up possibly inestimable wealth to the people, not our we know best self appointed absolute rulers!
Rhrosty.

Rhosty, your information is wrong yet again. For a start the Great Barrier Reef is nowhere near the edge of our tectonic plate; the plate extends to NZ and the Solomon Islands.

Some environments are much more sensitive than others. It is entirely logical for Greens to be more concerned about the risk to the most sensitive environments, especially when those environments are the most biologically productive and diverse. So if there is oil under the Great Barrier Reef (which is very unlikely as it's geologically young) the benefits of extracting it may not be worth the risk. And it's certainly not worth the risk drilling for oil in the sea around Antarctica, no matter how much is there.

All hydrocarbons are reducing agents, but what made you assume Greens think all hydrocarbons are the same?

Natural gas can indeed be used to generate electricity in ceramic fuel cells. But those only work at high temperatures, and there's no way that burning any fossil fuel would give us the world's cheapest energy. And as I've told you before, electricity transmission and distribution losses are an order of magnitude less than you think they are.

And governments have always been keen to develop Australia's abundant natural gas deposits. That's unlikely to cease any time soon.