Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

In politics, as in life, we reap what we sow. Having promised the Australian people that they will bring down petrol prices in the lead up to the last election, the Rudd government is now reaping the barren harvest of their empty rhetoric.

It is extraordinary that we have a Prime Minister who so readily dismisses the concerns of average Australians and who is prepared to wave the white flag without ever making a serious attempt to address the issues that just six months ago he was labelling as core business for this new government. The Prime Minister did that when he made his Adelaide declaration. In it he shamelessly said that the Labor government had done as much as it physically could to provide additional help to the family budget. That is an extraordinary thing to say, considering that they have done absolutely nothing about the things that they were raising as issues prior to the last election. But now that they are elected, they are not interested. They are just waving the white flag and saying, ‘There is nothing further that we can do.’

The issue of the rising price of petrol provides a perfect metaphor for this government and the way that it operates. They raise an issue, then they feign concern about that issue, then they make some gesture—in this case the ludicrous Fuelwatch scheme—and then they blithely move onto the next thing without ever making one iota of difference to the problem that they first identified.

This is why we have a Prime Minister who seems to have invented his own language and finds it increasingly difficult to talk in plain English as he struggles with issues that he obviously does not understand or comprehend. This is why he never seems to know the detail of his own government’s policies and why he obviously fails to understand the consequences of the decisions that his government takes. This is why, I think, he reverts to this bureaucratically based language. It is something that, on the surface, is relatively funny, but it is something that ultimately protects him from ever stating a clear view. It is a language that always allows him to hedge his bets and it makes him never responsible for things. That is why he always says things like ‘I am advised,’ and it is why he does not have relatively simple facts to hand about his own government’s policies. This is why we get ridiculous policies such as Fuelwatch. This is a scheme that has been brutally unmasked by the resources minister today—a minister who often stands out, I think, as a beacon of common sense on the other side and who actually takes the time to understand the consequences of the decisions that cabinet makes.

Members will know that this scheme has been in operation in Western Australia for some time. I asked retailers in Stirling what they thought of the Fuelwatch scheme. One independent retailer gave me the example—

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