Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was a good speech that my colleague the member for Shortland has just made looking at alternatives. It is interesting that only one government speaker has spoken in this debate on the Petroleum Retail Legislation Repeal Bill 2006. That is a bit of an indictment of what that side of the House thinks about petrol prices. I see that two members from Tasmania, the member for Bass and the member for Braddon, are not in here endeavouring to defend the price of petrol or even to speak about their bosses’ policy of yesterday when they stole the Labor Party’s policy and brought it in. They are not even keen to be in here to defend that or even to put that before the people. So they are failing to give representation to the people of northern Tasmania about the price of petrol.

As my colleagues who spoke previously have mentioned, the Petroleum Retail Marketing Sites Act 1980 and the Petroleum Retail Marketing Franchise Act 1980 are outdated and serve no useful purpose in today’s petrol retail industry. Well over 50 per cent of the industry by volume of sales is not covered by these acts, including the supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths, which makes the rules for market participation inconsistent and unfair. That is bad for the industry and bad for consumers. Therefore, they need to be replaced, but replaced with something that actually deals with the problems facing consumers today.

The proposed Oilcode will finally bring the whole industry into a common regulatory regime with better protections for market participants and better protections for consumers. It will also, for the first time, bring some protection to commission agents and independent operators who currently do not have access to low-cost dispute resolution. But Labor is determined to go further and make amendments to section 46 of the Trade Practices Act, which are necessary to address outstanding concerns about the potential for abuse of market power. This is the substance of the amendment being proposed by this side of the House.

There is no doubt that the cost of fuel is concerning many people throughout the nation, and I am only too aware of the impact that is being felt across the electorate of Lyons. The regional nature of communities means that relatively long distances are travelled as part of daily life. The amendment moved by the member for Batman puts responsibility fairly and squarely back in the lap of the government—a government that has lost the ability to look beyond today, to take their own advice on the future fuel needs of this great country—to fix what they have clearly ignored. This amendment calls on the government to ensure that the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources works towards increasing the market penetration of ethanol, biodiesel, LPG and CNG, giving a real choice to consumers and helping to reduce our reliance on the foreign oil market. Part of this process will require a study into the feasibility of a gas to liquid fuel plant, which includes the investigation of financial concessions and allowances to encourage investment in research and development and the infrastructure required.

It also calls on the government to embrace Labor’s first blueprint to cut tariffs on alternative fuel vehicles, including hybrid cars, and provide tax rebates for converting petrol cars to LPG, which is where the government stole Labor’s policy yesterday and badged it as their own. LPG is the only widely available alternative fuel capable of halving the average weekly family fuel bill at the moment, here and now. The challenge will be to provide a real incentive to encourage more outlets to install delivery infrastructure, especially in regional areas, and to increase usage outside the major centres, which would in turn create more consumer confidence in LPG as an alternative fuel. The government’s announcement yesterday acknowledges this fact with their rebate for converting vehicles to run on LPG.

Clearly, a bigger stumbling block to introducing a new fuel is funding delivery infrastructure and gaining enough public support to convert or purchase vehicles capable of running on the alternative fuel during the early stages of introduction. This too was addressed in yesterday’s announcement, and it is about time too. It only takes 10 years to get this implemented, and it is Labor Party policy when it is done. Affordability of new technology is always going to be a difficult issue unless a real financial incentive is given for consumers to change. The amendment moved by the Labor Party paves the way for a reactive approach, paves the way for a responsible approach and gives ways for it to be achieved.

I have been approached by many of my constituents from across the electorate of Lyons who are concerned about their future. Many of them are people who have worked productive lives building the communities that they call home. Many of these communities do not have the services or major hospitals, banks or department stores that many of us are able to take for granted, and they accept, to some degree, that they will be required to travel some considerable distances to access these services, but never in their wildest dreams did they think that the cost of fuel would reach $1.50 a litre and that they would be $40 to $50 worse off every single time they filled up their fuel tank.

The fact is that fuel is taking food off the tables of the people who can least afford it. It does not matter whether I am talking about an average single pensioner or a family with four children: the cost of fuel is biting because the average amount of fuel required does not change that much, but the cost does. In any week, in any town, families are still driving the kids to school or to the school bus. They still have to do the shopping; they still need to pay the bills, to get to work and to take little Peter to the doctor.

Spare a thought for the delivery drivers who, through no fault of their own, have been contracted to deliver goods, from newspapers to shipping containers, at a set rate negotiated before fuel costs rose the best part of 50 per cent. Add these astonishing figures to the steadily rising interest rates, which will have a significant impact on business loans and overdrafts in the coming months, and remember them when their backs are against the wall of their economic future.

But this is not the end of the matter, as the impact of additional fuel costs begins to affect community services in all regions and centres. Volunteers who deliver meals on wheels; Lyons, Apex, Rotary clubs; sporting clubs; advocacy groups and even volunteer emergency services are at risk of losing valuable members simply because the cost burden is too great for people to be volunteers. To get there to be a volunteer is costing people a lot of money. The very people who fill the gaps required to build better communities are finding the going pretty tough, to say the least. How much longer this has to be endured will directly determine what services will survive into the future. This must be addressed by finding ways of getting alternative fuel supplies to the general population now. We certainly cannot afford to let the issue lie for another 10 years.

The amendment being proposed is a simple solution to a complex problem. It is not the complete answer; it is a start in the right direction. It provides a foundation, with processes to follow and targets to meet. The answers that come from the required reporting system will drive research and development and the roll-out of fuel alternatives as well as provide support for progressive vehicle technology to reach the marketplace. After all, there is not much use spending millions of dollars on R&D if the outcomes never see the light of day—if we never get to see the results of that in practical terms. This amendment is a simple solution, but that is not to say it will be an easy task to overcome the problem. The problem will not go away. We need to work smarter, not necessarily harder; and to do that we need achievable goals and a process of making it happen.

We have heard a lot about ethanol in the last three weeks. I support the blending of ethanol with petrol, but it needs to be done in an economic and sustainable manner. My good friend the member for New England has been a champion of this for a long time, and a man who takes his work representing the people of Australia and the people of his electorate very seriously. I have listened to his words over a long time now on this matter. And my colleague Mr Fitzgibbon spoke in the House last week. He reinforced the difficulty of mandating ethanol up to a 10 per cent blend at this present time and that the country simply does not have enough opportunity to produce enough ethanol to get to 10 per cent at the moment. So there has to be a heck of lot of work done to get production up to any level like 10 per cent.

There is a clear need to support further development of the ethanol production industry, and Labor showed foresight by presenting our plan for the future fuel requirements of this country before yesterday’s announcement. I know some years ago we had a pilot study in Tasmania with the sugar beet industry, looking at ethanol in farm tractors and other vehicles. So the opportunities for the rural sector are quite real when we start talking about ethanol production.

Biological ethanol production is quite simple, I understand, compared with other fuel refining methods, and there are a number of very good reasons to begin producing it on a large scale. The first and foremost reason is that it is quite literally home-grown fuel—it gives us some independence. The largest single use of ethanol is as a motor fuel and as a fuel additive. The largest national fuel ethanol industries exist in Brazil. I remember speaking to the Brazilian agriculture minister last year. I think the member for New England was there with me. The Brazilian ethanol industry is based on sugar cane. As of 2004 Brazil produced 14 billion litres annually, enough to replace about 40 per cent of their petrol demand. Also, as a result, they announced their independence from Middle East oil in April 2006. It is a pretty important milestone, I would think, in one’s country’s history when you can say that you have your energy and fuel at an independent level and you are not relying on a very unstable part of the world. I will say it again: Brazil announced their independence from Middle East oil in April 2006.

We are floundering in this country. Most new cars sold in Brazil are flexible-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol, petrol or any blend of the two. In addition, all fuel sold in Brazil contains at least 25 per cent ethanol. Flexible-fuel vehicles are nothing new. Henry Ford was the first person to mass produce them, with the Model T, which was designed to run on an ethanol and turpentine blend. So it goes back a long way. As it turned out, the petroleum industry saw an opportunity and took it, creating an industry that we have struggled to escape or have some independence from ever since.

Yesterday we heard the Prime Minister, John Howard, address this House with all sorts of facts and figures claiming that the fuel tax in Australia is low by international standards, but he failed to mention why it is that other countries have higher fuel taxes or what relevance that has in comparison to our overall economy. He was simply playing with the figures in an attempt to take attention away from his inaction on alternative fuels. They certainly do not reduce the pain of paying for a commodity which is fast becoming a luxury.

Europe has alternative fuels such as biodiesel available to the general public. It is made from a variety of waste or unwanted oils which would otherwise have been disposed of in some other way. The fact that there is a cottage industry of backyard biodiesel manufacturers speaks volumes for the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of this fuel.

I cannot remember where I read it but I did read somewhere that, if nylon strands could be made twice as strong and twice as thin, we would reduce world consumption of oil by one-third. I cannot tell you if there is any truth to that statement, but it certainly provides some food for thought if nothing else. It highlights the fact that oil is used by more industries than just fuel producers.

I have taken a broadbrush approach to this question because we need to have the debate about petrol and its possible replacements if we are to make the various forms of energy available to the consumer. Petrol will not last forever and will continue to rise in price. We have to find alternative strategies and fuels, and we have to have a way of implementing them and putting them into our system. Being independent of other parts of the world is the way to go—home-grown fuel, home-grown processes.

I understand that natural gas in cars is an option for the future, but it needs R&D. I understand it might take 1½ hours to fill your car up with natural gas but you would probably run it on 20c a litre. Those are incredible savings, but how do we get there? We get there by having R&D and governments willing to chase a positive approach.

We have enormous amounts of natural gas in Australia, but we do not have a pipeline from the North West Shelf to the eastern seaboard of this country. Maybe it is time we started to think in that way. Maybe we should start to think about building some infrastructure that can really set this country up for this century. Where is the population? Of course, it is on the eastern seaboard.

We accept that the world market of oil dictates to us and we say that if we have anything else we are kidding ourselves because, if we ever had to go on the world price of oil, that would affect our economy. Of course it would, but if you have home-grown energy you can do that a lot better. If towards Christmas this year petrol gets to $2 a litre, which some commentators are talking about, that will mean a great deal of sadness for many people in Australia.

The Labor amendment gives us some opportunities and this government ought to be picking them up, like they picked up our policy yesterday and ran with it. They ought to be picking up the other amendments that we have put up here to give this country an opportunity to go forward and not give us another 10 years of doing nothing, of not backing R&D or moving us forward. I will be supporting the amendment by the member for Batman, and I certainly hope the House does.

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