David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A tax is a tax. I would like to come back to the whole question of fuel. As we heard a couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister said in relation to this:

We have done as much as we physically can …

Well, that did not work too well. Let me just remind honourable members that, since this government was elected—and up until a week ago—the price of petrol has gone up over 13c on average, and in the last few days it has gone up even more. That is an increase of 10 per cent. While I think that most of the public realise the underlying reasons for this, the public are also well aware that the Prime Minister went to great lengths to try and deceive them during the election by saying that with petrol prices it was the previous government that was not worried about the increase in costs and that if the Rudd Labor government was elected it would do something about petrol. Well, it has sure done something: it has announced Fuelwatch to watch the price keep going up.

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