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

This has been a very free wheeling and wide ranging debate so far. Of course, the price of petrol is very germane to a tax that will increase the price of hybrid cars in Australia. I do think that these two things are very closely linked.

The government are just feigning concern about petrol prices. They often raise an issue that they are concerned about—and they raised these issues in the lead-up to the last election—and say that they will do something about the issue. They then come up with some sort of stunt, they make some gesture to show that they care and then they move on to the next thing without ever addressing the problem that they first identified. I think that style is going to wear very thin with the Australian people.

The reason we are debating these tax increases—and some other bills that are essentially being rammed through the parliament today—is that the energy minister has blown a hole in this scheme that the government is proposing to bring down the price of petrol. This will flow directly on to people who will go out to buy a hybrid car and find that that hybrid car is more expensive because of the policies of this government. I want to remind the House, because I think it is terribly important, of what the energy minister actually said about this Fuelwatch policy, a policy that will make hybrids more expensive—

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