Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly. It is $1.22 in Townsville. There you go. These are places that are similar in nature. We have provincial centres, Mackay, Rockhampton and Townsville, and a couple of mining towns, Blackwater and Moranbah, and there is a complete diversity of prices between all these centres in regional Queensland. That is the thing that people in my electorate are continually asking for answers about. It is not just the higher price; it is also what is behind this discrepancy. Well might they ask, and it is the kind of question we asked of the Prime Minister in question time yesterday—and of course we did not receive a satisfactory answer.

The answer really is that the government continues to talk about petrol prices but refuses to take the tangible action that it could take to do something about it. The Prime Minister said on 12 May:

We will again ask the ACCC to look at these prices.

It is all about talking to the ACCC and looking at prices. But the fact is that at the moment the ACCC only informally monitors petrol prices. The Treasurer needs to write to the ACCC and request that it conduct a formal inquiry into petrol prices under part VIIA of the Trade Practices Act. For 11 years the Treasurer has refused to take that step. Obviously he does not care about how much petrol prices are hurting motorists in Australia, but the Labor Party does care about it. We understand that petrol expenses take up a large part of the family budget, so we in the Labor Party have said that we will give direction to the ACCC to formally monitor petrol prices. We will give the ACCC the power it needs to get behind whatever racket is happening in Central Queensland, as these petrol prices in Rockhampton are so much higher than—(Time expired)

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