Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Chris Bowen says that if you believe that you will believe anything. That is charming! The member for Prospect is accusing the chief executive of Woolworths of lying. That is the level of desperation; he will say anything. I have quoted what he said. The government will say anything. Day after day we have had this report from the ACCC misrepresented by this government. Yesterday I gave the Prime Minister the opportunity to highlight the passages that recommended the introduction of FuelWatch. There are none. He froze. He was not able to do anything because he knew that on pages 17 and 18, right at the beginning—he did not have to get into the depth; he could just read the executive summary—all that the ACCC said was that there are big issues surrounding FuelWatch, big issues about prices and about competition and that a great deal more detailed assessment has to be done before a government could confidently embark upon it. That assessment has not been done. The only assessment that has been done by the government, by its own departments—the departments which the Prime Minister said he would put front and centre in his new style government; he said he would take notice of public servants, give them credibility and listen to their views—was to conclude that FuelWatch was a dud. As the member for Batman said, in words that were so heartfelt, this will punish people on lower incomes, people who need to buy petrol at the lowest price.

Remember that the member for Batman comes from an old Labor family. I remember his father, Jack Ferguson. He was a good, old trade unionist, Labor politician and Deputy Premier of New South Wales, and he was full of very commonsense wisdom. Some of that wisdom is in his son Martin. He knew that this ambitious, arrogant Assistant Treasurer, so keen to get into the cabinet, so keen to run over the top of his colleagues, was going to trample not just on the integrity of the Public Service, not just on his colleagues, but on the interests of the people he represents. So when Martin Ferguson, born in the western suburbs of Sydney, representing a Melbourne seat, writes to the member for Prospect and says, ‘This will hurt the people of Western Sydney the most,’ he is saying—and he did not need put that in the letter because it is implicit—‘Western Sydney are the people you represent, you dope.’ That is what he is saying, and that is what the member for Prospect has forgotten.

The ACCC has done a so-called econometric analysis. It has been done by an economist called Stephen King. We met with him last night, as we did with Mr Samuel and Mr Cassidy, the chief executive. The ACCC does not argue for the adoption of FuelWatch in this report. That much is plain. Subsequently, it is true that Mr Samuel has been rather more supportive since December, and Mr Ferguson was very critical about that in his letter. But the fact is that not even Mr Samuel is prepared to say that Fuel Watch will result in lower prices. The most that Mr King, the economist, could say was that, on their analysis, they felt that prices in Perth would have been 0.7 of a cent lower were it not for FuelWatch. That is on their analysis. Their analysis has not been published, not been analysed by others and not been peer reviewed, and nobody has been able to assess it. It has not been published in the report—and we all know that different analyses can come up with different results. There are serious flaws in the analysis which the ACCC acknowledges. For example, it compares prices and calculates the average price by looking at the prices charged by every petrol station and then averaging that over the number of petrol stations. Of course, nobody pays the average petrol price, as my colleague the member for Cowper very wisely observed—nobody gets the average rainfall either. The real issue with averages is: what is the distribution? What is the spread between the lowest and the highest price?

The member for Batman was smart enough to work this out. Even if the average is the same between one market and another, if the distribution around that average—the range from the lowest to the highest—is greater, it means that, for those people who are really focused on saving a few cents a litre, there is more opportunity for them to get that lowest price. And, inevitably, a price-fixing mechanism like this will compress the range of prices. That is completely overlooked in the analysis.

The other factor is that a price that is averaged over the number of petrol stations is meaningless because petrol stations do not all sell the same amount of petrol. The only average that matters is volumetric, and the ACCC say, ‘We don’t know that data; we can only work with what we’ve got.’ Just because their data is the best they have got does not mean it is any good. This is a government of shameless spin. I have often wondered about the difference between the Prime Minister and his predecessor but one, Mr Latham. I have realised today what it is: the only difference is that this leader of the Labor Party got found out after the election.

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