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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. What we are debating today, this increase in the luxury car tax, is a tax grab, and I really wanted to link it back—and I think this is very important—to the price of fuel. I think that is very germane when we are talking about increasing taxes on luxury cars, including hybrid cars I might add. The reason I would like to talk about this is that we have a government that promised the Australian people that they would bring down the price of fuel. They have now been called on that; they need to implement that promise. And, in doing so, they needed to come up with something to say, ‘Look, we’ve implemented this promise, we’ve tried to bring down the price of fuel.’ They have come up with this Fuelwatch idea. It is a plagiarised idea, like so many of this government’s ideas; it is an idea they have stolen from Western Australia. It has been tried in my home state for the past seven years. If you are a Western Australian, you have some idea about the effects of this policy. Certainly retailers and consumers in Western Australia know that this is a policy that has ultimately and spectacularly failed to bring down petrol prices in Perth and in Western Australia.

I want to outline to the House why we are debating this legislation today. It is because we have a government that is very keen to change the story from the fact that its Fuelwatch scheme—the grand plan that it has to implement its election promise to bring down fuel prices—has been roundly panned from within its own ranks. It has been panned by the Minister for Resources and Energy. What the energy minister had to say was that the scheme was uncompetitive—

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