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

I would be very interested if the Assistant Treasurer wants to respond to this. The independent retailer furnished me with the example of how he asked the authority that oversees this scheme whether he could decrease his petrol prices at the pump. This authority said that if you were to decrease your petrol prices, they would fine you for it. This is the ridiculous policy that this government now wants to impose on the whole of Australia. What an absolute farce.

This is a scheme that will not bring fuel prices down. You do not need to take my word for it. Let’s see what the Minister for Resources and Energy has to say. He actually understands a thing or two about the way the world works. He is the minister who wrote to the Prime Minister, to the finance minister, to the Treasurer and to the Assistant Treasurer to expose this policy as anticompetitive, a waste of taxpayers’ money and a policy that will not lead to lower prices. This is a very important point to make for the Assistant Treasurer and the members for Blaxland and Lindsay. He also said that the biggest losers from this policy will be working families in places like Western Sydney. So the resources minister in this government has confirmed what we already know and what is slowly being revealed to the Australian people: that there is always a yawning gap between what this government says and what this government does.

This is a Prime Minister and a government that made promises to Australian families to bring down the price of petrol, and it has completely and utterly failed to implement that promise. Now they have raised the white flag and said, ‘There’s nothing more we can do about it.’ Australians deserve better than this. They deserve more than spin and stunts. They deserve a government that stands up for their interests and does something about the rising price of petrol. (Time expired)

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