Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Their hysteria does not worry me, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is an example of how irrelevant they are. Their points of order, their interjections, have complete irrelevancy.

Let us come to the question of FuelWatch. What we can say about the Howard government is that there was a period when the Australian public believed that the Howard government was competent to manage the economy; I absolutely concede that. There was a period when the Australian people believed that. What has happened since the last election is that the Liberal Party has destroyed any reputation it ever had for economic responsibility. It has completely destroyed it. It destroyed it on budget reply night with its smash-and-grab raid on the surplus of $22 billion, inevitably putting upward pressure on interest rates and inflation—and high interest rates and high inflation are simply enemies of working families, the people they feign concern about now.

In relation to FuelWatch, the opposition also seem to have forgotten even the most basic principles of economics. Let us have a little recap of those basic principles. What economics tells you is that markets are tremendously efficient mechanisms for delivering supply and low prices if participants in the markets have perfect information. That is why, when you are at the open stalls of a fruit and veg market and you have people competing in front of you for your business and all the prices are known then you will get the best price. What was happening in our petrol market and what is still happening today is that the suppliers of petrol and diesel have great information because of a service called Informed Sources, which they subscribe to and which means that they can track petrol prices in their region and indeed across the nation.

Suppliers of petrol and diesel have all of that information at their disposal. But the other participants in this market, the consumers, do not have access to that information. We want to get this market to work properly by ensuring that consumers also have access to that information. And we want to do that through FuelWatch. It is a very simple concept, even though the opposition seems unable to grapple with it—a very simple concept. What I know from my electorate on Melbourne’s urban fringe is that people need to buy petrol and they are highly price sensitive. They understand that petrol prices and diesel prices in this country relate to world factors. They understand that, but what absolutely drives them to distraction is the sense that they are being treated like muppets by the oil companies through price manipulation. That is what they hate. They hate the Friday spike before the long weekend. They hate it, and they feel misused by it.

We are trying to make sure that those price sensitive consumers who need petrol and who need diesel have good information. What FuelWatch would enable them to do is, in the evening, log on—or even do it through their mobile phone—and check what petrol prices are going to be in their locality, at the petrol stations on their drive to work or to school or to the childcare centre the next day. Because all the petrol stations need to file their price at the same time they do not know what others are going to be pricing, so they are putting in their best price to sustain their sales on the next day, and people can then survey across the petrol stations in their locality or along the routes that they commonly drive and assess which one they want to go and get their petrol from.

What FuelWatch in Perth tells us is that variability in prices between petrol stations on a given day can be 10c, 15c or 20c a litre. If you are a highly price sensitive consumer, if you drive perhaps from Werribee to the city every day—a very common journey for people from my electorate; it is more than 30 kilometres—you would be able to identify which petrol station you would want to stop off and buy at. You would, of course, buy from the one that on that day was 10c or 15c cheaper than the other ones. Why would the opposition want to deny consumers access to a system like that? They have not explained it. They have not explained it because they cannot explain it. The amendment moved by the government talks about how the opposition are playing the game of big oil in relation to the stance they are taking. It is certainly not a stance in the interest of working families. It is a stance in which they are being manipulated by big oil.

I want to take members of parliament to a very interesting article by Steve Lewis that was published earlier this year in the Courier Mail. It relates to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who is here in the chamber. It talks about how she made up her mind about Australian workplace agreements. It talks about how she went to an opera, hosted by mining companies, in the Margaret River area. At the opera, she consulted on what to do about industrial relations. Well, I am not opposed to the opera. And I talk to mining companies. But, when you are making a decision, you should also talk to working families. The one thing that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition did not do, that the opposition have never done on industrial relations, is talk to working families. They are not in this parliament today representing the interests of working families with this flawed motion that even they have not taken seriously in their performance.

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