Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Few people in the House will be unaware of the theory of peak oil—that there is simply not enough undiscovered oil on the planet to keep up with ever-increasing global demand and that we are therefore destined to suffer from reducing supplies and skyrocketing prices. It seems that there is good news for those who worry about this. There has been a big new oil discovery. It has been made by none other than those opposite. After 12 years in government and six months in opposition, the Liberal Party have discovered petrol. Congratulations on your discovery! Where were you for the past 12 years?

When the Liberal Party were in government things were a little different. They stuck a GST on petrol and sat back and watched billions of dollars in revenue flow in as petrol prices rose. Then they signed up for the coalition of the willing which invaded Iraq, causing massive disruption to global oil production and triggering a relentless rise in the international oil price which continues to this day. Thirdly, they kept the ACCC out of any serious role in monitoring petrol prices. They simply did not believe in it. They were content to allow the absurd roller-coaster ride we have at the petrol pumps around Australia to proceed unabated.

Does anyone here seriously believe that dazzling rises and falls in the petrol price are anything other than a form of market manipulation? Does the price of bread, milk or phone calls move up and down on a daily basis? Of course they do not. But the Liberal Party have now discovered petrol after washing their hands of the pain felt by motorists throughout the past 12 years. Back at the end of 1998, 10 years ago, the average petrol price in Melbourne was around 63c per litre. By the time of the change of government it was $1.33 per litre, more than twice what it was back at the end of 1998, and, of course, it averaged $1.44 in April.

The discovery by the Liberal Party of petrol has taken an interesting form. They have expressed opposition to Labor’s Fuelwatch. That is right—they are opposing it. Those opposite, who have presided over massive rises in the price of petrol and marketing and consumer arrangements which clearly and manifestly failed, want us to keep the status quo. They do not want to see the marketing arrangements change.

What Labor have been doing in relation to petrol is to implement our election commitments. We promised to have a full-time cop on the beat, with full monitoring powers, and we have delivered. The government appointed Pat Walker as the nation’s first Petrol Commissioner. He began work on 31 March. The government has given him full powers under part VIIA of the Trade Practices Act to formally monitor unleaded petrol prices to keep petrol companies in check. The government has also asked the Petrol Commissioner to have a renewed focus on LPG and diesel prices—and we are moving to implement Fuelwatch.

This scheme will require petrol stations in metropolitan and major regional centres to notify the ACCC of their next day’s prices by 2 pm the day before, to maintain this price for a 24-hour period and to apply the scheme to unleaded petrol, premium unleaded petrol, LPG, diesel and biodiesel blends. The petrol price information collected from these petrol stations will be made available to consumers through an email, an SMS alert service informing subscribed consumers of details of the cheapest fuel in their area, a national toll-free number on which motorists can locate the cheapest petrol in the area in which they are looking to purchase fuel and a national Fuelwatch website with station-by-station, day-by-day, suburb-by-suburb petrol price information.

But those opposite have opposed this. They want to stick with the same petrol marketing policies which have failed motorists in the past. As is pretty well known, this scheme is modelled on the scheme which has been at work in Western Australia since 2001. The Western Australian scheme was introduced by which party? It was introduced by the Liberal Party. The ACCC has found that there has been a reduction in prices in Perth of around 1.9c per litre on average for the period from January 2001 to June 2007, compared with the period from August 1998 to December 2000. My colleague the member for Hasluck has pointed out that FuelWatch is a popular consumer tool in Western Australia. The website gets over 200,000 hits per month, and over 30,000 people subscribe to the email service. Even more significantly, it is shown during the evening news on commercial TV stations in Perth. That is the measure of its popularity. Motorists can sit there the night before and decide which particular direction they are going to take in the morning, to go via the petrol station with the lowest prices that day. That sounds pretty reasonable to me. That sounds like something that would be useful for motorists in keeping them informed and helping them to make informed decisions, and I support it unreservedly.

But the big issue is: what is the position of the Liberal opposition? Yesterday the shadow Treasurer was hopping into it. He described it as ‘extraordinary’. He said that Fuelwatch was ‘an assault on competition, an assault on free enterprise, an assault on the market’. ‘We in the Liberal Party stand for enterprise. We stand for competition,’ he thundered. He tried to anticipate the obvious objection to this, that giving motorists information about petrol prices is procompetitive, not anticompetitive, by saying, ‘We are very happy to have prices disclosed on the internet through websites. That is all good; more transparency is fine,’ before going on to oppose what he described as fixing the prices. But the point here is about making disclosure meaningful. It is about real-time free markets. It is about giving consumers a chance. A contract to buy is about offer and acceptance. It is not much good if the price can change from the time a motorist sees it on a website to the time he or she gets to a petrol pump. In the present situation it can and does change, but it seems that, from yesterday to today, the shadow Treasurer has not been able to stick to his militant line. Today he said of Fuelwatch that they are going to support some of it and they are going to oppose some of it, just as this morning he said of the luxury car tax that they might be in favour of it or they might not. Just as his budget backflips caused the finance minister to talk about the soft Malcolm and the hard Malcolm, now we have Malcolm in the middle, a shadow Treasurer who has no idea of whether he is in favour of Fuelwatch or against it—Andrew Peacock without the suntan indeed. The shadow Treasurer is Andrew Peacock without the backbone.

It is worth taking a moment or two to find out what the people who are most likely to know about these things think. I would have thought that Western Australian motorists would have been a pretty good place to start. The Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia has recommended not only that the FuelWatch system be maintained in Western Australia but that a similar system be adopted in other states. In Western Australia this scheme has bipartisan support. That is because it works. The scheme also has the support of New South Wales motorists. NRMA President Alan Evans says:

Our research shows that FuelWatch is a benefit to motorists and if introduced in the eastern states, then they’ll get the benefits the people in the west have been receiving for a number of years ...

Fuelwatch is also supported by the leader of the New South Wales Liberal Party and by his fair trading spokeswoman, who said:

My federal colleagues appear to be unaware of what’s going on in the Sydney market.

It is supported by the leading consumer publication, Choice. So I know who I am going to trust in the matter of Fuelwatch. I will be on the side of motorists; I will be on the side of consumers. Members opposite are anxious to protect the interests of the oil majors. They always have been. But Labor said before the election that we would adopt petrol-marketing policies to help motorists and that is precisely what we are doing here.

The Prime Minister has said this policy ‘does not represent a silver bullet’ but that ‘it does, however, help competition policy at the margins’, and he is right on both counts. It is a testament to how rapidly and dramatically the Liberal and National parties have disintegrated since losing office that they come into this place and raise as a matter of public importance—presumably something they think of as strong political terrain for them—an issue about which they are unable to muster so much as a clear, coherent position. They are all over the place like Queensland cane toads. If this is the best they can muster, they continue to shred their economic credibility. (Time expired)

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