Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Again I return to the question asked by the honourable member, quoting the Liberal opposition fair trading spokesman in New South Wales, the state from which she comes. The spokesman said:

[Labor] has shown leadership ... we think it’s good news for motorists and we’re quite happy to come out and congratulate the federal Labor government for doing it.

If the Liberal Party cannot sort itself out within Canberra on where it stands on excise, it certainly cannot sort itself out nationally about where it stands on FuelWatch. I find it remarkable that those opposite could hold open the possibility of this measure being blocked in the Senate.

The bottom line is that there is no silver bullet when it comes to petrol. We all believe that we need to help working families under financial pressure to the greatest extent we can in dealing with the pressures on the family budget, but we certainly do not have the view that those opposite had barely five or six months ago that working families have never been better off. We did not make an undertaking to the Australian people that interest rates would be kept at record lows. What we have said quite consistently is that we need to enhance what we can by way of competition policy. One statement after another the member for Higgins criticised us for putting forward those policies in opposition, saying that they were not sufficiently prescriptive on the future. Check the member for Higgins’s statements on this in his transcripts. So I say to the honourable member that this will help at the margins. We do not wish to understate it and we do not wish to overstate it: it will help at the margins. But we think in terms of the experience of Western Australia it is the right way forward. Of course there will be conflicting advice on these questions, there will be conflicting evidence, there will be conflicting points of view. We, however, believe this is the right way forward.

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