Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No answer. They are still smudging. They voted against it today. Are they going to vote against it when it becomes legislation? You would think they should vote for it, because it is Western Australian Liberal Party reform—they are the ones who introduced it. Barry O’Farrell thinks it is a great idea. He said Fuelwatch would ‘ease some of those wild fluctuations in weekly pricing’. Catherine Cusack, the Liberal Party spokesperson for fair trading in the New South Wales upper house, supports it. Good on you, Catherine. You are on the right track. We heard also from Choice magazine. Before the coalition attacked Alan Evans from the NRMA, we heard from him. We know that Alan Evans supports Fuelwatch. He thinks it is a good idea. He thinks it will help people that are out there battling with petrol prices. What about the RAC WA? I think they support it as well. They support it because it will increase competition.

The ACCC conducted an inquiry—we did not ask them to do it; the former government asked them to do it. I think the member for Higgins, the former Treasurer, commissioned the work. What did it say? It found that current conditions were conducive to anticompetitive conduct. That means that petrol companies were passing information between each other but people buying petrol were none the wiser. They did not have the information they need; they had to rely on pot luck.

I did a little bit of research on fuel today in Sydney. The Leader of the Opposition extolled the virtues of buying petrol on a Tuesday—how important it is, the cheapest day of the week—and said that there were going to be people lining up. I think he described in quite some detail people lining up to get petrol today. I asked myself: how much is petrol today in Sydney? It depends on where you go. The cheapest price is $1.47 and the dearest is $1.62. That is the point. There is a big differential: almost 13c difference in the price depending on which petrol station you turn up at in Sydney today.

Effectively, you have got to rely on pot luck. People are not given the information they need to make the decisions they need to make. After mucking around in the chamber today and trying to delay the vote until after the TVs go to air, the question is: what are you really going to do on Fuelwatch? Are you going to frustrate the legislation? Are you going to pass it in the Senate? I can see members opposite suddenly going very quiet, not wanting to give me an answer one way or another. I just want a yes or a no.

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