Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I put my name down to speak on the Petroleum Retail Legislation Repeal Bill 2006, there had not been statements by the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition with regard to challenges for our energy industry. But it is good to see that the Prime Minister has, belatedly, responded to the petrol price crisis and—I guess precipitated by a backbench revolt—made some announcements, paltry though they are, on this matter. It seems important to every driver of every vehicle that goes through my electorate, so it is nice to see that, eventually, it became important enough for the Prime Minister to spend one half-hour considering the future of our industry in this nation. I welcome that effort. However, as the member for Grayndler and others have said, it certainly has fallen short in properly attending to the problems associated with our needs in this area.

Further, it was lifted from Labor Party announcements that were made last year and repeated throughout the course of this year. It certainly worries the opposition and, indeed, it should worry every person in this nation that this government takes so long to respond to matters of such urgency. It should concern the Australian nation that this government is so out of puff and out of touch that it has not considered these matters properly.

Mr Deputy Speaker Barresi, I congratulate you on being elevated to the important position of chairing the IR task force and I will be happy to talk with you about that at another date. It is good to see the government responding to the important issues and the adverse effects that Work Choices have already resulted and will result in. I look forward to our engagement on those matters—a bit of catch-up there also for the government.

Getting back to the particular bill before us, the Petroleum Retail Legislation Repeal Bill 2006 should have been introduced into the House some time ago. As the member for Batman rightly asserted, never has reform of the petrol retail industry been needed so urgently. The Petroleum Retail Marketing Sites Act 1980 and the Petroleum Retail Marketing Franchise Act 1980 are no longer appropriate in today’s environment. Well over half the industry by volume of sales is not covered by current legislation, and that includes the retail stores Coles and Woolworths. Clearly, the rules of market participants are not providing the necessary competition, which in the end hurts consumers. Although the mandatory Oilcode, pursuant to section 51AE of the Trade Practices Act 1974, will place industry under a common regulatory regime with some protections, reforms should also include—this was mentioned by the member for Batman—amendments to section 46 of the Trade Practices Act in order to attend to the potential for abuse of market power.

Unfortunately, this government has been stagnant in reforming this industry. This failure to reform has produced chickens—and they have come home to roost. I mention chickens, but I do not want to go any further than using it as a metaphor; I know that it has been used in recent days in this House to refer to the Treasurer. However, I think it is important to note the government’s long-time failure to respond to this industry. Let us not forget how long this government has been in power. Having entered its 11th year in power, this government cannot continue to blame its predecessors on matters of public policy. It seems to want to try to blame or to shift the blame to others, its predecessors, even though it is now into its fourth term.

Therefore, I would ask the government to start to take some responsibility. It should start to realise that it has been in power for more than a decade. It should accept that these matters have to be resolved by the government of the day—and, of course, as soon as possible. One of the problems we have is that the government has left it for so long to respond to these problems that we now have a crisis in petrol prices, which places unbearable burdens upon ordinary families.

I know that in my electorate many households are under enormous strain. Families are experiencing difficulties in using their vehicle to go to work and then using it to drop their kids off at school and at sporting events. In no way has the requirement to use the car diminished but, because of the price hike in petrol, people are facing real difficulties in meeting their ordinary day-to-day family obligations. I consider, first and foremost, that a government that is in touch with the electors, the people who voted it into power, should attend to the need of looking after the basic requirements of families—and that certainly is not happening with these price hikes.

That is not to say that these hikes were not foreseen. We have seen a gradual increase in petrol prices. We have seen a few occasions when very high spikes have occurred in the price of petrol. I accept that the government does not have full control over this situation and that there are external factors that help to determine the price of petrol. But certain things that are within the reach of government have not been implemented by the Howard government—and that is the failure.

Combined with the increase in petrol prices, which is causing an enormous burden on family budgets, there is the increase in interest rates. For a member of a family living in Caroline Springs in western Melbourne, a very fast-growing community—a very good community, I might add—wanting to get their kids off to school and then to get to work by either going back towards the city or heading towards Geelong or to other parts of west or north-west Melbourne, these concurrent increases both to mortgages and to petrol prices have caused enormous distress. By the way, these increases have already eaten up the tax cuts that were announced on last budget night, so effectively very little relief at all is now being felt. In fact, people at the very high end of the income scale may still be doing reasonably well or be doing okay because they received the much greater proportion of tax relief. However, 90 per cent of householders in my electorate received only a paltry sum, and the additional expense from the interest rate rises and petrol price hikes has certainly gone well beyond any amount they may have received in the form of tax relief as a result of that budget decision.

Clearly, there is a real failure of economic policy by the government in attending to these needs. Remember, that is coming off the back of an election campaign, when the Prime Minister looked the television camera straight in the eye—he looked at every Australian voter—and said, ‘I will keep interest rates down,’ and effectively implied that he would keep them down for as long as he was Prime Minister. We can see from the advertisements as well that he played loose with the truth by effectively saying he would keep them at record lows.

Let us remember that, firstly, there have been three interest rate increases since the Prime Minister’s government was returned. So there is already a failure to fulfil his promise. I am sure even the Prime Minister would not try to call interest rate promises noncore. I reckon he would have a hard time actually describing interest rate rises as non-core promises. He could give it a go because he has done it with other matters. We know that he quite happily disqualifies promises after the event when he fails to comply with those promises, but I do not think anyone will accept that three interest rate rises are anything other than a reneging of a commitment to the Australian people that he would not place pressure on the family home.

I do not want to distress people unduly and I do not want to create unnecessary alarm, but it will get to a point—and I see the Assistant Treasurer is at the table, and he knows this—where in certain parts of Brisbane, where the Assistant Treasurer resides, and Melbourne, where you reside, Mr Deputy Speaker Barresi, where the member for Watson resides in Sydney and indeed where I reside in Melbourne banks will foreclose and people may have to consider selling their homes. That is an awful thing. That is a dreadful thing to contemplate. If we look at the combination of petrol price increases cutting into the family budget combined with the increase in interest rates—we now know that a higher proportion of the household income is paying back the interest rates on the mortgage than was the case in 1991; we know there is now a higher proportion of household income being spent on just servicing the interest on the household home—we know that we have major problems. And the government has not attended to those problems.

The way the government has chosen to respond to the petrol prices is too little too late. But I guess you have to start somewhere. As the Leader of the Opposition said in his response, we welcome any relief. If it is stealing our ideas, we do not care. We think it is a sign of a good opposition when the government has no ideas of its own and it takes ours. We will happily accept that, because we do not care whether they are ours or the government’s, as long as they are being used to alleviate the problems associated with the burdens due to the petrol increases and the other associated increases to which I refer.

That is why there has to be a change to the way in which we use energy. We have to move away from a reliance on particular sources of energy, particularly Middle Eastern oil. It seems to be now that there should have been more done to look at the way in which we would remove ourselves from areas which are not stable and cannot provide stable sources of fuel. The member for Batman, the Leader of the Opposition and others have referred to the need to look at other sources and new technologies. Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition, in a blueprint speech last year—as long ago as last year—mentioned the need to move into new technologies. I think there should have been a much quicker response by government to do that.

When you are assessing the way in which a government is responding to these matters of national importance, it is important to see the way it is operating. You want to know whether it is sensitive enough to respond to the problem. As I said, the only reason there has been a statement this week is a backbench revolt. The only reason the migration bill—that pernicious piece of legislation, that weak-kneed legislation—was taken out of the chambers, not to be voted upon, was the backbench revolting and crossing the floor.

We have a situation where the government is in disarray and in a ditch in areas of public policy. Again today in question time the Special Minister of State, as mentioned earlier by the member for Grayndler, showed that there is a divide in the executive government about the extent to which LPG can be used to provide relief for consumers. As we know, the Prime Minister hung his little hat on the importance of bringing forward the rebate to subsidise new cars that have capacity for LPG use and also a $2,000 rebate to convert vehicles to the use of LPG. We support that. In fact, it is something we promoted. We actually suggested that a long time ago. We also suggested quite a while ago, too, that we should not have an excise apply—certainly not the excise that is coming on board to affect LPG costs in the very near future. If the Prime Minister were serious, he would have deferred the impending increases to LPG costs by not applying the excise duty to the LPG, as will be the case in a few years. So there are a number of failings.

In question time today the Special Minister of State fundamentally contradicted the Prime Minister’s statement on LPG. The Prime Minister, in his statement—and I draw your attention to it, Mr Deputy Speaker Barresi—said, effectively, that he would announce these changes and these changes would accelerate the relief for users of LPG and for people who require private vehicle use. He went on to boast:

LPG is readily available through 3,200 service stations in Australia, and nearly half of them are in regional or rural areas. It is usually much cheaper than regular unleaded petrol and diesel due to a range of factors, including concessional tax treatment.

Well, that is true. But the impression the Prime Minister left us with is that this magic wand that he was introducing, by way of a statement in the House yesterday, was going to somehow, in some way, alleviate in an across-the-board manner the problems experienced by every vehicle user in the country who wanted to take up LPG conversion—that is, those buying new vehicles or, indeed, seeking to convert their current vehicle.

The shadow parliamentary secretary for the environment, the member for Throsby, in a letter quite rightly asked about whether there was any capacity for the Commonwealth to save money and improve its environmental standing, and she also asked about LPG matters. The Special Minister of State in response to her letter said, ‘LPG fuel powered vehicles do not meet certain operational requirements of users, nor is supply of LPG readily available in all regional and rural areas.’ The Special Minister of State said—and get a load of this, Mr Deputy Speaker—‘Further cost benefits are only achieved in most cases where vehicles’ travel is in excess of 50,000 kilometres, and this is outside the standard usage pattern of the Commonwealth fleet.’ So he is effectively saying no. He is saying that, in many respects—in fact, in most respects—LPG is not going to provide the alternative source of fuel required for the Commonwealth fleet. Whether you lived in a regional or metropolitan area did not seem to qualify. If you have problems of access to LPG in regional areas, where you probably use the vehicle more often—and they suggest that you only make a benefit when you use up to 50,000 kilometres—how many people will choose to take that option?

That was contradicting the encouraging announcement by the Prime Minister that somehow the LPG plan would be the silver bullet that would solve the problems that beset the nation. Instead, we have to say that this has been a failure by the Prime Minister. This is a government out of touch and out of puff on major matters of public policy. It does not respond unless there is a backbench revolt or a backbench member crosses the floor. The fact is that this government only responds now when there is an internal crisis, internal dissent or public displays of dissent. That is the only way in which this Prime Minister seems to be operating. He is not thinking forward or concerning himself with these sorts of matters. He should have foreseen these matters many years ago, but he failed to do so. (Time expired)

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