Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

A dead cow in your tank is not quite a tiger, Senator Murray, but I suppose it is getting there! So, significant amounts of biofuel are being developed at the Bulwer Island refinery in my home town of Brisbane. The CSR refinery at Sarina, near Mackay in Queensland, has a significant ethanol contract, as does the BP plant in Perth, which happens to be in my colleague Senator Murray’s home state.

Again, on a side issue, BP is the company that has produced Opal fuel, which is a very effective replacement fuel for remote communities to combat petrol sniffing. There are also market risks and price risks involved in developing that fuel, and there are cost issues in expanding its production. You cannot divorce those factors from the constraints that are placed on BP by the current inefficiencies of the existing sites legislation.

I say all that to put the debate in a broader context and to signal to others who, like me, have an interest in increasing the use of biofuels and ethanol, particularly in Queensland, that there is a direct link between the major players, who have to have a role in that, and current laws, which actually impede that. There are also related issues, as I stated at the start of my speech, such as the lack of progress with regard to Trade Practices Act reform. That is a much wider issue than just assisting small business and independent operators of petrol stations; it is important across the board. I completely understand and support the attempt to use this legislation and this situation to try to increase the pressure on the government to back up their words by taking some action for a change in this area—action for which there is widespread support and, I might say, almost universal support, at least verbally, from people on all sides of this chamber.

The primary legislation is still in the House of Representatives and has not yet been debated. If this disallowance motion is defeated, which I suspect it will be—just—then that still leaves us in this undesirable situation where the existing law is basically being negated via regulation which has no sunset clause on it. The oil code is not even operational, and there is even less incentive for the government to move on its repeal of the sites act, let alone the Trade Practices Act. That is an undesirable situation for pretty much everybody, whether it is the independent service station operators, the major oil companies or anybody else, because nobody knows what is going to happen. It is all just going to sit there pending, hanging over everybody, and it is not going to be resolved. That will create a situation of uncertainty for all players, and I think that is undesirable.

I have indicated here, on the record, my wider views about some of these issues. If the government would show some genuineness on this issue and even progress debate on the primary legislation and move it forward, then I might have a stronger belief that they are genuine about that they are doing. We also need to see some movement from the Treasurer, of course. From experience on a whole range of issues, that is an area where movement seems to be difficult to get. I do not want to add yet another element to the debate but, as I mentioned earlier today, this is a Treasurer who was willing to leave major reforms to choice of superannuation completely off to one side and not progress it at all for years purely because the government were not interested in moving at all to address discrimination within superannuation laws against same-sex couples. We have a Treasurer with a record of not even being willing to progress his own policy initiatives in a major area like choice of superannuation purely because of stubbornness about the important but nonetheless much smaller issue of removing some discrimination. So I do not hold my breath for movement from the Treasurer on this, but I really do hope that he does move.

With regard to that issue, we all have an interest in trying to maintain at least a fair playing field for small operators—the mum and dad operators, as Senator Joyce called them. I guess after today’s vote we will not have dad and dad operators or mum and mum operators; we are stuck with only mum and dad operators. But it is important to ensure that all small businesses get a fair go. As I said, the way the market has developed, a lot of them have been pushed out of business as it is, and that situation and those pressures on them are going to continue regardless of what happens. That is an existing situation and a reality that people have to deal with, but the continuing uncertainty about the future in this whole area is a problem for everybody from all sides of the debate. It is problem that only the government can resolve, and they can resolve it by actually doing something for a change, rather than just using a mechanism like this regulation to circumvent everything and make no progress on the core issues involved.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Joyce’s) be agreed to.