Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

We have just heard out of the mouth of the Leader of the House opposite that the government had brought in an irresponsible budget, and I have to say we all agree with that—totally irresponsible. That has to be perhaps one of the best Freudian slips that we have heard in this parliament—an admission by the manager of government business that the government brought in an irresponsible budget. This FuelWatch scheme is also irresponsible. It has grown out of the fact that, prior to the election, we had the now government, the then opposition, going around and promising to the Australian people that they would bring down the price of petrol, the price of groceries and interest rates. That was the promise that they made to the Australian people. Since they have come to government—in the six months that they have been here—we have seen a rise in petrol prices, a rise in grocery prices and a rise in interest rates.

We are in the situation where they thought they must be seen to be doing something—anything—so they have grabbed onto this concept of FuelWatch. It can probably best be described as the streaker’s defence—it seemed like a good idea at the time. Quite clearly, what FuelWatch is designed to do is to level out the bumps in the peaks and troughs of petrol over the cycle. It will get rid of the top peaks, the top price, over the cycle but will also get rid of the most discounted price, the bottom peak. That means that, if you are interested in paying an averaged price, you will say the average price will be less. But, as was pointed out by speakers earlier today, none of us buys at the average price. We buy at a point in the cycle where we can get the most effective price for ourselves.

There are great differences between motorists—great differences between the people who are buying fuel. You have those people who are up at the top end of the scale and do not really care what the price of fuel is—they will simply buy it. It might be put onto an expense account, it might be part of their contract price or they might think their time is more valuable than to be spent in queuing to get cheaper petrol. They really do not care at what point in the cycle they are going to be buying. They certainly do not care whether the price would be frozen for 24 hours. But there are an enormous number of people—retired people, veterans, people who are on fixed incomes, people with a disability who have a car adapted so they can drive it—a whole army of people, who need to buy petrol at the cheapest price they can get it. That is why, in Sydney in particular, if you are driving in the left-hand lane of the road and come across a petrol station, you will inevitably find you have to get out of that lane because there will be a queue waiting to get into that petrol station, usually on a Tuesday evening, in order that they can buy their fuel at the cheapest end of the cycle.

For the government to come in here and say that they are relying totally and utterly on Graeme Samuel’s view of the ACCC report really says a lot about the structure of their scheme and the paucity of their arguments. The fact of the matter is that the inquiry that the ACCC did began in June 2007 and was supposed to report in October but then reported in December. When it did report, it said some quite significant things. One of those most important things is on page 257 of the report, where it says:

Assessing any system in the style of FuelWatch that incorporates increased price information and price commitment requires great care due to the potential for anti-competitive as well as pro-competitive benefits. Although the inquiry gained a preliminary assessment of the impacts in Perth from the scheme, it is clear that a case-by-case approach is required to assess the potential impacts on competition of any similar scheme. In particular the ACCC has not analysed the application of such a scheme to rural and regional areas. Apparent extra considerations here include the increased potential for anticompetitive effects due to the more concentrated nature of the market, the extra cost in initialisation, administra-tion and compliance and how to decide which areas to cover.

In other words, this report posed more questions than it ever answered; yet the government have seized upon this like a man drowning in the ocean.

The fact of the matter is that once that report was made available the government departments which are central to any decision-making process in government—the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Prime Minister’s own department; the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism; the Department of Finance and Deregulation; and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research—all said that this was not a scheme that should go forward. Indeed, it would be anticompetitive and it would not deliver the benefits that the government says it would deliver.

Now the government has chosen to ignore its own departments. The one minister who did not ignore his department was the member for Batman, who wrote to the Prime Minister and told him that they should not go ahead with this scheme because it was anticompetitive and it would punish people. You can well ask the question: why has the government chosen deliberately to penalise those people—veterans, pensioners, a variety of pension holders, people to whom every cent counts—by ensuring that the cheapest petrol that is now on the market will disappear, forcing them to pay more? One could be kind and say that perhaps they announced the scheme and did not under-stand the implications of it. One could be less kind and say, ‘Oh well, it means people who are earning more money, who are in the Prime Minister’s definition of working families, can afford to pay a bit more.’ It does bring to mind this whole focus on the rhetoric of the Prime Minister about only being interested in working families—that is, people in the paid workforce. He seems to have no care at all for people who are retired or outside the workforce. Whether they are on pensions or are self-funded retirees or disabled or single parents, they obviously fall outside his definition of care, which is only for this narrow group of working families.

This is totally inequitable, totally against the interests of the Australian people and totally against the idea that this government put out when it was in opposition that it was going to care for those people and bring in policies that would not only not penalise them, but somehow would assist them. The censure motion that was moved by the Leader of the Opposition this morning states that the Prime Minister and the government should be censured because they were letting down the Australian people and deceiving them over record high petrol prices by:

(1)

describing petrol prices at over $1.60 a litre as “a little problem” for Australian consumers and giving up on them …

(2)

… misleading Parliament and the Australian people on the contents of an ACCC report—

ignoring the Prime Minister’s own depart-ment and the departments of other ministers that advised that this scheme should not go ahead and refusing to immediately lower petrol prices, which is the only way in which government can have an actual effect on what price is paid at the browser, by cutting the 38c a litre in tax on $1.60 a litre.

We have said, quite sensibly and rationally, that we would reduce the excise by 5c a litre. The government then put out a little thought that it might perhaps remove the GST from the bowser price. But then we have the situation where the leaders of the Labor Party governments in the states would have to agree to that before it could be changed, and of course they would not agree unless they received compensation and so that would result in a reduction in price of about 3.7c per litre. So the bottom line is that in trying to catch up to the sensible proposal of the opposition to lower the petrol price by reducing excise tax, it came up with a scheme that would in fact deliver less and would be more inefficient. But that seems to have gone by the board also, and we are back to FuelWatch.

When one reads further into the report of the ACCC, which the government have chosen as the be-all and end-all basis for this policy, one sees the government have not taken the advice of the ACCC, set out on page 17, that says that the government should conduct a detailed assessment of important issues raised by FuelWatch, including whether it had anticompetitive effects, reduction of predictability of prices and costs. Again and again, when they say they rely on the ACCC report, they are ignoring the major findings of it, which is to say that it is at least imprecise in the sense that it has more information it must gather. I go back to that quote relating to the fact that there has been no work done by the ACCC relating to rural and regional areas.

So we have the situation now where people are being excluded from consideration because this government is only focusing on people who are in the paid workforce; pensioners, veterans, disabled people, single parents are all outside the purview of this government. People who live in rural and regional Australia are also outside consideration in this report, and I repeat: the ACCC has not analysed the applica-tion of such a scheme—that is, FuelWatch—to rural and regional areas. Extra considerations here include the increased potential for anticompetitive effects due to the more concentrated nature of the market and the extra cost of initialisation, administration and compliance, and how to decide which areas to cover. It is a very big agenda that is being put by the ACCC to be considered subsequently before any decision was taken. But I would again point out that four government departments, whose advice would normally be heeded, have said that this scheme should not go ahead. These four government departments have had the advantage of studying the ACCC report and making their comments and remarks after having studied that report.

The net result of pursuing this FuelWatch scheme—or should we call it a ‘foolwatch’ scheme?—is that those people who rely now on getting cheaper petrol by being able to go to the lowest peak in the cycle and buy cheaper petrol are the people who are going to be disadvantaged. Those are the people who now queue on a Tuesday night in Sydney and on whatever the day in the other states is where the lowest price in the cycle is being charged. They are the people who fill up then. They are the people who are then able to maintain their purchasing power through the grocery prices which the government said it would bring down and has not. They are being penalised on all counts.

This government said it would lower petrol prices, lower grocery prices and lower interest rates. It has done none of those. (Time expired)

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