Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Revenue) Share this | Hansard source

I was keen to allow the House to get on with the business of the day, but I am provoked by the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources on a couple of accounts. First of all, I am very disappointed that he was not prepared to come to the dispatch box and acknowledge that the condition that Dawson be passed through the Senate before section 46 changes come into this place is unacceptable and inappropriate. I know he is in a difficult position, because I know he is dealing with a recalcitrant Treasurer, a lazy Treasurer, an arrogant Treasurer and a Treasurer who is unprepared to put first the interests of small business and independent players not just in the petrol market but in industry generally. What the minister has just asked the opposition to do is to give a leg-up to small and independent players by supporting section 46 reforms but to give them a big whack by allowing Dawson through the Senate without insisting upon our very sensible and responsible amendments. He thinks we should give small business something with one hand but take away with the other.

Let me take you through that. Amongst other things, the Dawson reforms make significant changes to merger laws in this country. First, they bring in a formal arrangement under section 50 of the Trade Practices Act, moving away from the current informal arrangements, which were hated by big business in this country because they gave business no formal decision on which to appeal to the Competition Tribunal, in the first instance, and, in the later instance, to the courts. So big business has been given that formal process. Somewhat reluctantly, the opposition has supported that measure.

The second change is a change to the authorisation process. If a big business cannot get the tick from the ACCC under the competition test under section 50, it then has the right to go to the ACCC under authorisation on the public interest test. In other words, it goes to the ACCC and says, ‘We accept your decision under the informal arrangement that you will not allow this merger because it is anticompetitive.’ Why do we make those decisions? We make those decisions because any competitive mergers are bad for the economy and are particularly bad for small and independent players. So a business goes to the ACCC and says, ‘Look, we accept that decision but we think that, notwithstanding the fact that the competition rules have not been met, it is still in the public interest for this merger to proceed.’ That has always been the law and it is a good balance. But what the government wants to do is to take the ACCC out of the authorisation process. How do you have a public interest test without the ACCC being involved? Without the ACCC’s involvement, who are the experts who will determine in the future whether the public interest, the interests of small business and the interests of independent players will be met?

The opposition would like to dig in and say that the ACCC must remain as much a part of the system in the future as it is now. But we have been more responsible, because we know how the Treasurer operates. We do want Dawson through because it contains some other important reforms. So rather than dig in, we have simply said this: ‘We think the ACCC should remain the key gatekeeper on the authorisation of mergers.’ We want to allow them to stay in the process at least for the first 40 days real.

I say ‘real’ very deliberately. Under the current arrangements, whether it be because of gaming on the part of the applicant or because the ACCC has been constantly requiring further information, the 30 or 40 days now required under the act can blow out to 100 or even 300 days. If after the first 30 days the ACCC says, ‘We will actually need some more information on this,’ and the party goes back and gets the information, that takes another 60 to 90 days and it can blow out to a considerable period of time. That of course presents some problems for that applicant.

So Labor proposes this: you make the application and after 30 or 40 days—to be honest I forget which it is—in real time, you get a deemed refusal. If you do not have a result from the ACCC in that short time period, you have the right to go to the Australian Competition Tribunal. There could not be a more responsible and agreeable proposal than that. Yet this is the basis on which the government holds up important section 46 reforms for small business. It is because the Labor Party wants to make a minor change to its legislation. And we know how the Treasurer operates: if it is not his idea, he will not accept it.

The Treasurer is prepared to cut small business loose. (Extension of time granted) He is prepared to repeal the Petroleum Retail Marketing Sites Act without the necessary additional protection of section 46 reforms because he is not prepared to accept the most minor of amendments to his merger authorisation proposals in the Senate. We must remember that this Treasurer has now had 10 years to make the Australian Competition Tribunal a creature of his own. We see many debates in the United States about Supreme Court appointments. The Treasurer has his own little Supreme Court sitting in this country, and it is called the Australian Competition Tribunal.

He has now had the opportunity to appoint or reappoint every member of that tribunal. Therefore—and it happens in politics—people are appointed or reappointed who are of like mind to him. It is just not good enough for the Australian people. It is not good enough for the small business sector in this country to have important merger authorisation decisions determined by the Australian Competition Tribunal before the ACCC has had an opportunity to test the merits of the case on public interest grounds. So I appeal to the minister to talk to his Treasurer and tell him to put the pride and the stubbornness aside, to think about the small end for a change and about the impact on the economy of giving everything to the BCA that it asks for on mergers but not coming forward and giving the small business sector what it requires under section 46.

I heard a bit of a whisper that the government had a meeting yesterday with some of the representatives of the small business constituency. I would be very delighted if the minister were prepared to share with us the attitude of small business representatives in that meeting and what they thought about the Treasurer’s idea of holding section 46 reforms back until Dawson is passed. So I invite him back to the dispatch box to tell us what transpired at that meeting and to tell us how pleased small business must be at the moment in response to the government’s approach to these issues.

In closing, can I say something about petrol prices, which are very relevant to the Senate message we are considering today. How extraordinary it is for the minister to stand here and say that this government has done more to bring petrol prices down than any other in its time. It is an extraordinary statement from the minister, and he must know it is not true. No-one in his constituency believes it, and the member for Hotham was absolutely right. The government came into this place and said: ‘We concede the GST is a tax on a tax on petrol. In regional areas it has a compounding effect because of transport costs and greater levels of competition in rural areas, so we will introduce a grants scheme of 1c, 2c or 3c, depending on how remote you are, to compensate.’

We said at the time, as the member for Hotham indicated, that it would not work, that it would go straight into the pockets of the major oil companies. What has the government now done? It has admitted all these years later that there is no way of knowing that the grant is being passed on to the consumer, and therefore it feels compelled to repeal to grant. But, again, as the member for Hotham said, there is nothing in its place. So, having conceded back in 2000 that the GST is a tax on a tax with a compounding effect and a much greater negative impact on rural and regional motorists—and he represents one of those regional electorates in Queensland—the government is not prepared to do anything about it. How does that work? He needs to come back to the dispatch box and either apologise to his constituents or put forward some positive proposal to deal with that issue.

He also mentioned the government’s policy, which I think he might have called the biofuels policy or energy policy, the centrepiece of which was the LPG conversion scheme. What an extraordinary centrepiece that was. The opposition of course support measures to promote the use of LPG in this country. In fact, we support all measures to promote greater diversity in our fuel mix, including ethanol, biodiesel, and the list goes on. But the LPG grant scheme is just crazy. I have made the point here a number of times that less than three per cent of motor vehicles in this country will have access to this scheme.

The Prime Minister came into this place this week and admitted that already the government has spent more on advertising the scheme than it has paid out in grants. The advertising budget has been larger than the value of the grant scheme. That is despite the fact that demand is always going to outstrip supply, and therefore there is no need to advertise the grant scheme because not everyone who wants to access the grant scheme will get access to it anyway. So it is just a farce. It is blatant misuse of taxpayers’ money in promoting the government, not promoting the LPG scheme, and the government should hang its head in shame. (Time expired)

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