Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

What the public has a right to be cynical about is the Australian Labor Party trying to play politics with the issue of petrol pricing. That is an extraordinarily cynical thing for the Australian Labor Party to do. Having been a party in government, they know full well that the price of petrol is directly a function of the price of crude oil, which has in fact increased substantially in the last year or so. Yes, it is true that crude oil prices are very high. That is reflected, as is always the case in every country on this planet, in higher prices at the bowser. We have no magic wand to change that. We have no effective means of ensuring that the mechanism by which supply and demand interact to determine the price of oil can be changed by waving a magic wand.

The government are extremely sympathetic to ordinary Australian families, who are bearing the brunt of those prices. We do not like it any more than they do. We wish that petrol prices were lower. We have acted to ensure that there is no upward driver of petrol prices on the part of the federal government by ending Labor’s indexation of the excise on petrol. We removed that indexation in 2001. At the same time, we lowered the excise itself so that the tax on petrol is now considerably lower than it would have been if we had simply maintained the Labor regime of indexing the excise and keeping the excise at the base level at which we inherited it.

We have constantly asked the ACCC to ensure that it does monitor petrol prices to make sure that there is no undue, improper or illegal activity. The ACCC regularly reports that it can find no evidence that petrol prices are unfairly pushed up by oil company profiteering. This is a highly competitive market. There are many retailers, most of them operating on very small margins. There has always been and probably always will be, given the nature of petrol retailing, considerable fluctuation in the retail prices that consumers find. As with most markets, the only advice that we can give to consumers is to ensure that they monitor the prices and that they do frequent those petrol stations that keep their prices low—that they go to those petrol stations which are offering competitive prices. We will continue to ensure that the ACCC does closely monitor petrol retail prices to ensure that there is no breach of the law, no breach of the Trade Practices Act.

But I would ask rhetorically: what is it that the Labor Party is proposing? Is the Labor Party proposing some sort of federal government price control of petrol? Is the Labor Party proposing that somehow we ask OPEC to lower its crude oil prices? The Labor Party has no answer to this. The Labor Party is just cynically exploiting consumer concern about this. The Labor Party can tell its own state governments to do what the Labor Party in Queensland—