Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I think the member for Casey can look at plenty of transcripts before the election. It is an extraordinary misrepresentation to claim that that was not said prior to the election—extraordinary. There have been quotations made from this very dispatch box, in transcript after transcript, where the position before the election was made patently clear. The difference is that, while we do not believe that there is a silver bullet on this, where we can help we will—where we believe we can provide some sort of assistance for the pressures that motorists face.

It is not just petrol. They just keep hearing: ‘Petrol, petrol, petrol.’ They need to understand that diesel prices matter too. Get out of the capital cities and talk to someone reliant on diesel. Talk to the fishermen at the moment—the fishing industry—and the pressures they face with respect to diesel. Talk to the people who are trying to run a tractor and look at the pressures that they face with respect to diesel. This is a FuelWatch debate. This is a critical problem with respect to the different difficulties that people are facing.

There are global pressures—of course there are global pressures—but that is not an excuse for doing nothing. That is not an excuse for the previous government’s neglect year after year and simply coming back with the view that working Australians have never been better off, ignoring all the pressures that come to bear on the cost of living. The cost-of-living pressures come from both directions: they come from the need to make sure that the market is as competitive as it can possibly be, and they also come from making sure that people have the financial resources to be able to pay. The previous government took them out at both ends. They decided to do nothing on cost-of-living pressures, they decided not to give extra powers to the competition regulator and, at the same time, they introduced Work Choices so that people had a diminishing capacity to pay in the first place.

When it comes to the balance of what you do for people’s entitlements and the industrial relations debate, we say, ‘Give them fairness in the workplace’; those opposite say, ‘Give them Work Choices.’ When it comes to the cost-of-living pressures at the other end of how the family budget gets squeezed, we say, ‘Give the competition regulator every extra power that we possibly can and introduce schemes like FuelWatch so that you can transfer the power from the oil companies to the consumers’; they say, ‘Do nothing.’

Let us not pretend for a moment that the information is not made available at the moment. At the moment, through Informed Sources, the oil companies get the information. The oil companies and the petrol stations can log on and find out what the price of fuel is at different stations around the country, and yet, at the same time, those opposite do not want to give that same power to motorists. They took a long time to make up their minds and decide. Finally, they decided whether the information should be available to the petrol stations and the consumers or whether it should only be available to the petrol stations. They decided to keep a system that locks consumers out of the information equation. That is the path that the opposition have gone down. Of course, it is the opposition in this place that has that view, but it is certainly not the view of the Liberal Party around the country. You only have to look at the comments made by Barry O’Farrell to see the view of the Liberal Party in New South Wales. They quite sensibly came to a view and said: ‘This won’t be a be-all and end-all, but we should help where we can.’

The most telling point about how this scheme could work was when we asked the Deputy Leader of the Opposition to make clear how her views differed from those of the Liberal Party in Western Australia. She responded across the dispatch box: ‘Oh, I’ll get to that later.’ Well, we did not realise that she meant she would get to it later—as in not during her speech, not during that day, not during that week. She did not get there at all, and the reason the Deputy Leader of the Opposition did not get there at all is that when she goes home to Perth she gets to watch the news. She gets to watch the news and find out that consumers get told where the cheapest petrol prices will be the next day. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition gets provided with that information. Instead—

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