Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is good every day to have another example of the shamelessness of this Prime Minister. We have been treated to speaker after speaker citing the report of the ACCC. Here it is. This is the one belonging to the Assistant Treasurer, which he tabled—barely read, pages unmarked. There is only one member of the frontbench who has read this document, and that is the member for Batman. He is the only one who has read it. What did this Prime Minister—this lightweight, this nonreader—say yesterday about it? He said:

The key thing is that when this matter was subjected to analysis by the ACCC, the conclusion was clear that this particular proposal of the government was worthy of implementation.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth of the matter is that the ACCC said a great deal more work needs to be done. The ACCC expressly rejected it and said:

... the ACCC decided ... it was not possible to fully review all the options with regard to their administrative implications, effects on competition or their likelihood of delivering the objective of increased price transparency. A detailed assessment addressing these issues would have to be made before government could confidently embark on any one of the suggested options.

This report does not recommend Fuelwatch; it quite expressly does not recommend it. In answer to a question from the member for Riverina, the Prime Minister had the gall, the shamelessness, to say that Fuelwatch would benefit motorists in regional and rural areas. Let us have a look at what the ACCC actually says:

A potential concern is that in less competitive markets—

this is under the heading of ‘Effects on regional and country areas’—

a FuelWatch type of scheme could lead to higher prices through anti-competitive effects. As a result further analysis of the effect of the WA FuelWatch scheme on regional and country areas is warranted.

This document has been read by only one member of the government—the Minister for Resources and Energy, the member for Batman. He read it very carefully and he knew, from all the information he and his expert department had, that the evidence was that Fuelwatch would push prices up, it would reduce competition and that there was no case made for introducing Fuelwatch—not even a case made by the ACCC. I look at the Assistant Treasurer opposite and I think to myself, ‘What a lightweight.’ He stands up and tenders this document in support of a proposition this report actually opposes. The report does not recommend Fuelwatch; it says: ‘You’ve got to do lot more work. Have another look at it.’

Then, of course, we turn to the Treasurer. The Prime Minister’s devotion to China and his fluency in Mandarin is much admired. But what puzzled us yesterday was a disturbing interest that the Treasurer appears to have in the North Korean Juchi culture. I have never heard a leader in government, other than Kim Jong Il, say so confidently, ‘The people are happy.’ He had the glasses; all he needed was a boiler suit and a bouffant hairdo and it would have been him standing at the dispatch box! What is going on? It is all very well embracing our neighbours in the region, but, really, should we begin with North Korea? It is very, very troubling.

The fact is that we have had from the member for Batman, the minister for energy, a very cogent analysis of what is wrong with this plan—that is the truth. What he has said, very simply, is that if you try to control prices in this way all you will do is eliminate competition and prices will go up. He said that the people who are most price sensitive, plainly those on lower incomes, will suffer the most, because they will not be able to have access to the lowest price. And in a very deliberate jibe at the member for Prospect, the Assistant Treasurer, he cited working families in Western Sydney. This was a minister who was furious that the interests of the people he had dedicated his life to—Australian working families—were being betrayed by a government devoted to spin, a government that is only focused on having a story to tell: ‘It doesn’t matter who is in favour of it, it doesn’t matter what the arguments are, as lang as it gives us something to say.’

The Assistant Treasurer received a letter some time ago from the Leader of the Opposition asking him for some assurances about Fuelwatch. The Assistant Treasurer replied on 16 April. This is what he wrote:

There is simply no independent analysis that has reached the conclusion that there is any upward pressure on petrol prices through FuelWatch.

This was two days after he had received very detailed, considered analysis from the minister for energy—a minister senior to him, a cabinet minister. This is the contempt the Assistant Treasurer holds his colleagues in. He dismisses them. ‘The member for Batman doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he can be dismissed.’

The truth is that consistently there have been serious reservations expressed about Fuelwatch. If we go back to Alan Fels when he was ACCC chairman, he noted back in 2003, in a report into fuel-pricing arrangements in Western Australia, that the 24-hour rule, where prices have to be nominated the day before and cannot be changed during the course of the following day, is:

... likely to have reduced rather than increased competition because it adversely affected independent operators.

Three years later, Professor Fels’s successor, Graeme Samuel, expressed the same concerns. He gave evidence before the Senate Economics Legislation Committee and said, on 3 August 2006:

... we have concern that that 24-hour notification can have a negative impact on competition.

At the same hearings on the same day, Brian Cassidy, the chief executive of the ACCC, said:

... we did have some concern that the 24-hour notification may well have acted to impede the ability of the independent chains to decide to discount, which they often do at fairly short notice, depending on where the market is, because they are required to actually give the 24 hours’ notice before they change their price.

That was the position of the ACCC right up to 3 August 2006. Then, in their most recent report in December, as I said at the outset of my remarks, what we have is no recommendation for Fuelwatch—none at all. It is a recognition that the analysis of it is very preliminary; there are enormous questions about it, its impact on independent retailers, its potential for anticompetitive effects in rural and regional areas and the potential for a reduction in the predictability of price cycles for consumers. This means, of course, the ability of those consumers who are focused on getting that lowest price: the price-sensitive consumers, the battlers in Western Sydney that the member for Batman was so concerned with and that the member for Prospect represents but is not concerned with. The ACCC recognised that concern and said that was another big question. They also identified the considerable administrative costs both on the government and for compliance.

We turn to another recent considered analysis. The Queensland government in August 2005 investigated petrol pricing in Queensland. The committee was chaired by none other than Queensland’s current Treasurer, Andrew Fraser, and it released its report in April 2006. This report examined Western Australia’s FuelWatch scheme and this is what recommendation 12 of the report said:

That the Minister for Fair Trading not introduce legislation to control petrol prices in Queensland based on the Petroleum Products Pricing ACT 1983 (WA).

The Queensland government responded two months later and the then Deputy Premier and Treasurer, Anna Bligh, now Premier, agreed with it. This is what she said:

The ACCC has investigated Western Australia’s 24 hour price fixing rule and found that average fuel prices would generally not be lower under the scheme. Furthermore, the model is very costly to establish and operate, with no tangible benefit to the community.

We have been told one falsehood after another about Fuelwatch by this government. We were told the ACCC recommended the implementation of this scheme, when in fact it is obvious that the ACCC has done no such thing. The document speaks for itself but it only speaks—and I focus my attention on the Assistant Treasurer, whose copy this is—to those who take the time to read it. We have seen a report from the Queensland government carefully analysing it and concluding that it would put upward pressure, not downward pressure, on prices. And of course we look at what the situation is today. We look at the website www.motormouth.com.au. In Perth today, the average unleaded petrol price is $1.54, higher than the average prices elsewhere in the country.

Really, that is what this all boils down to. This is a government that is determined to manipulate and constrain the market and that has no faith in competition. They say they are economic conservatives. This is old-style socialism; this is old-style nanny state. This is a Prime Minister who said in his remarks earlier in question time how horrible it was to have fluctuations in the price of petrol in the course of one day. So we cannot have price fluctuations in the course of one day. What is going to be next? Will fruit and vegetable prices be fixed a day in advance? What about real estate prices? What about shares on the stock market? What are we going to do? We want to be a financial centre in Australia but, no, we will have prices fixed the day before. We are going back decades and decades.

This is extraordinary. It is an assault on competition, an assault on free enterprise, an assault on the market, and, as always, when the market is assaulted the people that suffer the most are those that are seeking the keenest price. We in the Liberal Party stand for enterprise. We stand for competition. We believe in free markets. We know that the way consumers get the best price is through effective competition, a free market and ensuring there is a competitive petrol market—which there is. We are very happy to have prices disclosed on the internet through websites. That is all good; more transparency is fine. But fixing the prices is a way of controlling those prices and keeping them up. All that the government will do, for the sake of a headline, is undermine the position and living standards of the working families it so hypocritically claims to represent.

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