Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The honourable member for Batman says, ‘Steals our clothes.’ I do not actually think quite that. Perhaps they have cut one of the toes off our socks as they have long gone through this proposal. They have thieved that, because this $1.5 billion over the next eight years scarcely makes up a suit. The Prime Minister has finally acknowledged this problem today.

On the same day, the Howard government’s recent energy white paper, of which he is still proud, it appears, from the remarks he has made here today, was labelled by commentators as all but redundant. That white paper, which he said was the be-all and end-all, was labelled today by all reasonable commentators who know something about it as being all but redundant—meaningless—in terms of the problems this nation now confronts. The evidence is overwhelming: Australia needs a comprehensive Australian fuel industry plan, with more fuels, more types of fuel and cheaper and cleaner fuels. At the heart of this, we need policies to increase the supply of Australian fuels, especially liquid fuels made from gas, because we have such bountiful supplies.

I want to speak first about the huge potential inherent in turning Australian gas into liquids. To encourage exploration—and this is what there should have been here today, not just a flick pass to the minister for industry: ‘Come back to us, Ian, and tell us a bit about what we ought to be doing’—I believe there should be petroleum resources rent tax incentives for developers of gas fields who provide resources for gas to liquid fuels projects, but there is no mention of anything like that in the Prime Minister’s statement. There should also be the selective use of flow-through share schemes in the gas, oil and mineral exploration industry. Why on earth you would not do that to encourage exploration, I cannot fathom. I cannot understand, with the mining industry generally constantly approaching the government about this, why they would not do something serious about the flow-through share scheme. It encourages small explorers out there—gets them on the job—and backs up the big fellows. You can arrange it in a reasonable way so that it assists the big fellows as well. I would have this looked at across the whole of the mining industry; I once had an undertaking of that at a previous election, and it was a very sensible policy to encourage exploration. Further, there should be improved technology through a targeted funding scheme for fuels R&D.

To assist the construction of a gas to liquids plant we would develop a more favourable depreciation regime explicitly for it, examine a new infrastructure investment allowance for investment in Australian gas to liquids infrastructure, and work with industry to improve engine design and fuel quality standards, because both will need to change in the light of us increasingly becoming utilisers of the product of that gas to liquid technology. We would support the development of regional towns by building and supporting the infrastructure they need.

We also need to encourage Australians to buy cars that use alternative fuels. Today the Prime Minister has announced the government is adopting Labor’s proposal to subsidise the conversion of cars from petrol to autogas, or LPG, but it will take time to develop the infrastructure for the conversion of cars and the guaranteed supply of LPG from a network of distributors. Take-up could well be hampered by the availability of conversion workshops and LPG outlets. For example, in my home state there are now no conversion workshops in Karratha or Port Hedland, so vehicles are sent to Perth for conversion at a transport cost of $750. On top of that LPG prices in the bush are significantly higher, and what confidence can Australian motorists have that once they have made the switch to LPG the Howard government will not just up the tax?

In the last parliament alone the government changed its mind three times about the excise regime for LPG. If he is serious about fuel diversity, the Prime Minister should also take up Labor’s proposal to encourage a sustainable ethanol industry and he should ease regulation of biodiesel production on farms. There was nothing in this statement about biodiesel production on farms. Where was the National Party when this statement was being prepared? If you go around regional Australia now, they will nag you on this. They will keep telling you things like: ‘We’d love to and we do do a bit of production of biodiesel here, but every time we try to do anything with it we run into trouble. We have a regulatory regime which is utterly absurd.’ There was obviously no effort by the National Party for any serious input into this particular statement, because there is nothing in here that reflects the fact that there needs to be an easing of the regulatory regime around biodiesel on farms.

A long-term plan for an independent Australian fuel industry is essential, but the government should be doing so much more right now to give consumers confidence that petrol prices are as fair and reasonable as they could possibly be. It should support Labor’s move in the parliament today to strengthen section 46 of the Trade Practices Act to provide greater scope for dealing with abuse of market power. It should immediately strengthen the ACCC’s powers by giving the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the power to: formally monitor petrol prices at the terminal gate, and wholesale and retail petrol prices; obtain all information from refiners, wholesalers and major retailers in the transport fuel sector relevant to fuel prices, including costs, profits and margins; and conduct other inquiries relevant to the spiralling fuel prices.

That would be a serious mandate for the ACCC at this point in time. I would have thought that today, if the Prime Minister was going to at least bite and eat a bit of humble pie in relation to the Labor Party’s proposals around ethanol, having the minister have a look at gas to liquids technology and about picking up suggestions we made about LPG car conversions—if he is going to eat that much humble pie—he could have extended it out a bit and made his Treasurer eat a bit of humble pie too. It has basically been his straw man Treasurer who has been doing most of the blocking in relation to propositions made in this place and elsewhere that the ACCC, which is under his authority, needs to start doing something about protecting motorists. I do not know what it is. It is a hard and difficult task I suppose—maybe they would need an odd extra staff member for it; I am not sure! There must be some reason beyond simply the fact that every member of parliament gets a fuel card why the Treasurer cannot be bothered dealing with this particular problem.

There is nobody out there who believes that more effort could not be made in regard to monitoring fuel prices to ensure that they are not being ripped off, because the sight evidence to them, week after week, is that they are. That is all there is to it. No Prime Minister or Treasurer can give them the assurance that they are not being ripped off if that Prime Minister or Treasurer is not prepared to see the ACCC properly monitoring what has been going on with regard to the pricing arrangements for people at the petrol pump.

The government has no real plans here for transport fuels. I pointed out at the beginning that the government in that eight years is going to make over $100 billion at today’s prices out of the fuel excise. This initiative, with a bit of cheating up in regard to an estimate of forgone revenue, makes $1½ billion over exactly the same period. The Prime Minister was proud to say, ‘Look, I don’t want to do anything about reducing fuel excise.’ That is $2½ billion a year if you take 10 cents off. That would be much better spent, I think he said, on education, on defence and I am not sure if he did not say on developing something in relation to the fuel industry. There is a hell of a lot of surplus left in that $100 billion in terms of the $1½ billion here that he has been talking about.

But I do want to pick up, before I conclude, on one or two of the false claims that the Prime Minister resorted to in relation to Labor’s fuel plan. The Prime Minister falsely claimed that the Labor Party support a tax on carbon emissions. The Labor Party have not ever supported a tax on carbon emissions. There is only one serious prospect of major carbon taxes in this country, and that is if the prime minister has his way, as he will have if he wins the next election, and develops a full-blown nuclear power industry in this country. I can tell you this: there is absolutely no way you can make the economics of a nuclear power industry in this country work unless you slap a massive tax on gas and coal to ensure that they are rendered uncompetitive with nuclear power when people come to paying their electricity bills. We are not talking here about the odd 10 per cent here or there; we are talking about taxes in the realm of about 100 per cent of the cost if we are going to make that work.

What the Labor Party have called for is a market solution on carbon emissions, the sort of market solution that is now appealing more and more to American states as they work around the blockage in Washington and make their own deals with the people in Europe who are interested in carbon emissions trading regimes. That is a very different thing from a tax on carbon. That is a market based performance in bringing down our levels of carbon emissions, and an absolutely essential co-commitment with any serious policy related to dealing with the huge problems we now confront globally in relation to greenhouse gas emissions. This was not meant to be a debate or a discussion about greenhouse gas emissions, but the Prime Minister managed to bring it up in the remarks that he made in this place and to give us a gratuitous, deceitful and dishonest slap on the way through.

The simple fact of the matter is there are things that we need to do. In the same way we should be preparing Australia to be independent of Middle East fuel, we should also be preparing Australia to make a contribution to dealing with a problem which massively threatens great Australian values, not to mention all our coastline, the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu—all of which, on the government’s own conservative scientific analysis, will be effectively washed away within 20 years. That is not the report of some bug-eyed greenie out there in the bush who is communing with a rainbow; that is the assessment of Booz Allen consultants, which the Commonwealth government set up to advise them on that subject.

We do think we need to be in emissions trading, but we do not think, as the Prime Minister thinks subliminally, that we ought to be into carbon taxes, which will be absolutely essential if he is going to make that nuclear power of his work. He also had something to say, and I thought there was a real cheek to him here, about the value in a particular area of utilising wind as a mechanism of power generation. I mean, really, after that performance, that quite probably illegal performance, by the minister for the environment in Gippsland! There has been a lot of discussion around this chamber in recent weeks about the fowl yard and the presence of chickens and otherwise in the parliament, but this is a parrot—the thousand-year parrot: once in every thousand years a parrot may be flogged by a windmill working in Gippsland. On the basis of that, this government of geniuses, this government so basically concerned with the development of renewable energies and Australian alternative fuels and the rest of it, sees it vetoed by the minister for the environment. It does not go ahead.

This is a Prime Minister who has no track record of any decency at all when it comes to dealing with the critical issues this nation now confronts in getting itself energy independence—or for that matter in getting ourselves into a position where we make a serious contribution to bringing down levels of greenhouse gas emissions globally. He actually has some moral responsibility in both areas. His moral responsibility in relation to making us independent of Middle East oil is that he has made a small contribution to making it a great deal more expensive.

The simple fact of the matter is that though we are now three and a bit years on from the conclusion of the first phase of the hostilities in the Iraq war—to which the government committed us and unwisely and without patience argued that our American friends and allies ought to be committed to too, intervening in the debate inside the United States on whether or not the US should go to the Iraq war on the side of war against those in the State Department, like Rich Armitage and others, who were arguing patience—the production of oil from Iraq has averaged less than half what it was in its admittedly very straitened circumstances prior to then. Having become a byword in corruption through the oil for food program, their resolution of it was to commit acts that operated in such a way that there would be no oil at all.

The Labor Party has put forward a serious proposal with serious measures that needs to be considered by the government. There is an additional obligation to have those things considered when we look at the government’s take of excise at the petrol bowser. The Prime Minister came into this place and occupied the House for 30 minutes to talk about a scheme, all of which appeared in the Labor Party’s document. At least, the words appeared in the Labor Party’s document; of course, the Labor Party proposals, except in the area of LPG conversion, went way beyond anything that was suggested by the government here.

The Prime Minister rarely makes a statement in this place—he had to effectively have his hand forced to make a statement about the troops going to Iraq—and he never makes one of 30 minutes length. Today for 30 minutes he laboured mightily in the field to bring forth a mouse. With $100 billion raised, there will maybe be $1½ billion committed to this in that same period. Will there be independence from Middle East oil? No. Will there be monitoring of what has been going on in a way that would give ordinary Australians some satisfaction? No to that as well. It was a very disappointing statement indeed. It was definitely a Geoff Boycott innings. I suggested it might have been a Geoff Boycott century; I think it was a Geoff Boycott 99 not out—so not only is the crowd disappointed; ‘Geoff Boycott’ Howard ought to be disappointed as well.

Debate (on motion by Mr Turnbull) adjourned.

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