Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McEwen’s words are eerily reminiscent of the Hon. Julia Gillard’s words last week when she told the opposition that they should simply get out of the way and let the government govern. Well, in the Westminster system, we take a different view. We believe that a responsible opposition should hold the government accountable—and that is exactly what we are doing this afternoon by pointing out the way in which cost-of-living pressures have adversely affected the Australian people under the wonderful new world of the Rudd Labor government!

In the lead-up to last year’s election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd raised expectations among all Australians that he would help out with cost-of-living pressures. He raised expectations that he would do something about fuel prices; he raised expectations that he would do something about grocery prices. Mr Rudd’s idea of doing something is to create Fuelwatch and GROCERYchoice. I am an English teacher and I would have thought that ‘watch’ and ‘choice’ involve two very passive concepts. You can watch and watch, but you do not actually have to do anything. GROCERYchoice has not eased the cost-of-living pressures in Australia. In fact, the cost of living is higher than it was 12 months ago.

I would also like to point out that the words that Mr Rudd used before the election and the words that Mr Rudd used after the election are proving to be somewhat different. He talked a great deal about ‘opportunities’ and ‘working families’ et cetera. I will not tell you all about these again. But the Senate might like to take note of the fact that he used the phrase ‘fresh ideas’ 87 times before the election but has used it only seven times since. Perhaps we have not got any ideas and we are looking for fresh inspiration. He has proclaimed ‘the buck stops with me’ only once since November—perhaps he has now realised that he really is Prime Minister—although he declared that that would be the case 31 times in the lead-up to the election.

Mr Rudd’s way of working ‘the buck stops with me’ is to pass the buck even further on. One hundred and fifty-plus reviews, committees, commissions, working groups, inquiries, discussion papers, summits, audits and consultations are all wearing the brunt of ‘the buck stops with me’. But perhaps he is just too obsessed with getting out a message every 24 hours. The net result of that is that he has obscured the message overall. Mr Rudd may not realise this but the Australian public do. Most members of the Australian public are in a week-to-week battle of paying food prices, grocery prices in general, fuel prices as they fill up their car, the mortgage, interest rates on that mortgage, private health insurance and so on. They are far too worried about where the next week’s money is going to come from to have a chance to think about Mr Rudd’s grand ideas.

Let us take Fuelwatch. The coalition opposes Fuelwatch. Fuelwatch calls on petrol stations to nominate the price they will charge for petrol the next day. This has been trialled in Western Australia. As we all know—those of us who do drive cars—fuel prices fluctuate during the week: they are often higher on the weekends, dare I say it, or before school holidays than they are on any particular day during the week. Motorists can make a choice about when they are going to fill up their car, and a lot of motorists choose the day on which fuel is cheapest. That normally happens once a week. Fuelwatch in Western Australia lengthened the fuel cycle from one week to two weeks, and that meant that there was only one cheap day in the fortnight. That forced consumers to purchase fuel at a higher price every other week. According to the Australian Automobile Association, 76 per cent of motorists buy fuel at least once a week, and 88 per cent of them are aware that petrol is cheaper on certain days. Well, if we go the full way with Fuelwatch, that will not be able to happen. Many of the motoring associations have indicated that they do not support a national rollout of Fuelwatch. The AAA—the Australian Automobile Association—the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland, the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria , and RAAA in South Australia have indicated that they do not support this. The Australian Automobile Association in their press release of 30 March 2008 stated:

Lower prices on Tuesdays, coupled with high volumes is a simple equation that translates to working families being able to save money each year by taking advantage of existing, predictable price cycles.

That will not happen under Fuelwatch. Indeed, information sourced from the ACCC indicates that, under Fuelwatch, proportionately more Perth motorists are buying petrol at prices greater than the average price for fuel over the cycle. There is no concrete evidence that Fuelwatch has lowered petrol prices in Western Australia and there is no guarantee that this scheme will temper petrol prices. Mr Rudd needs to explain to the Australian people—and his speech yesterday to the Press Club would have been a very good opportunity—how Fuelwatch will lower the cost of fuel. No motorist should be worse off under Fuelwatch, but we have yet to see that proven.

So we are watching prices, which is a very inadequate response. Australians expect their government—and this is what Senator McEwen and the other Labor senators on the other side of the chamber are now charged with doing—to come up with policies that will keep cost-of-living pressures under control, which is what the coalition did in its 11½ years in office. Home loan rates averaged 7.25 per cent, unemployment was down to a 30-year low and average real wages grew 21.5 per cent from March 1996 to June 2007.

Let us take the small item of private health insurance. With the new threshold that has been imposed by the Labor government, those who drop out of private health insurance because they feel they do not need to pay it anymore will be the young and the fit. The people who stay in private health insurance will be those people with families who want the best health care for their families and older people who are taking care of the illnesses they are encountering in their old age. They will bear the brunt of this private health insurance scheme because premiums will undoubtedly go up with a smaller number of people in each scheme.

Real wages dropped $8 or 0.73 per cent from June 2007 to June 2008. It is not surprising that ordinary average weekly earnings are falling when you look into the average retail price of selected items. Some of the items that I am about to name have become less affordable to ordinary Australians due to price rises. From June 2007 to June 2008 the following goods rose: milk, 12.5 per cent; bread, 5.7 per cent; a kilogram of fresh chicken, 39.9 per cent; corn based cereal, 21.1 per cent; 500 grams of strawberry jam, eight per cent; a kilogram bag of potatoes, 15.8 per cent; and a litre of unleaded petrol, 17.1 per cent. Many people across Australia are really having trouble balancing their family budget. More and more people are weighing up what they will pay this week and what they will pay next week in order to get to the end of the fortnight or the end of the month without having a debit bank balance. I believe that Australians ought to feel deceived by Kevin Rudd because he raised expectations that the government would fix these problems.

As I mentioned before, one of the solutions Mr Rudd has come up with—the GROCERYchoice website—has failed to address this serious problem properly. People do think about what they are going to buy in the supermarket and if they find another supermarket in their neighbourhood that is offering cheaper prices they may go and shop there, provided that they do not have to drive too far to get there and thus spend more money on petrol than they would actually save on buying the groceries. With the GROCERYchoice website, the people who are most likely struggling the most to balance their budgets—pensioners and low-income families—are the demographics least likely to have the internet. You cannot access GROCERYchoice without an internet connection.

GROCERYchoice does not offer prices on individual in-store products, only categories of products. That is, the bread and cereals basket, which shows an overall raising or lowering of price, does not help you identify if Cornflakes are cheaper than Rice Bubbles. Also, so much of the information is not relevant. I logged on to the GROCERYchoice website today and I checked out the prices available to those people in Heywood in western Victoria, a small town of 1,200 people where I lived for nearly 30 years. The problem with GROCERYchoice if you are a resident of Heywood—and this applies to all the small towns in western Victoria, western New South Wales and western Queensland—is that it compiles the prices of products across western Victoria ranging from Warrnambool to Swan Hill. If you wanted to go to Swan Hill from Warrnambool, that would be a return drive of somewhere between 10 and 12 hours. If you found cheaper groceries in Swan Hill, are you likely to set out from Warrnambool to go and buy those cheaper groceries? I suspect not. You would need to refuel an average family car three times to get there and that cost would add up to more than the savings you would achieve on the grocery products. I know many people from Warrnambool and I can tell you that none of them travel to Swan Hill to do their grocery shopping. In fact, even the $1.19 saving that was identified in a supermarket in the neighbourhood would be eaten up by fuel consumption if I shopped at Coles instead of Safeway by the time I got down the road anyway. So how are we expected to take this seriously? Similarly for towns in eastern Victoria, where the website says ‘click on your region’, it identifies towns from Morwell in the Latrobe Valley to Wangaratta, which is near the Murray River. This is simply laughable.

GROCERYchoice and Fuelwatch, which look at prices instead of actually doing something about them, are substandard policies implemented by a government obsessed with reviews and spin rather than actually delivering tangible results for the people of Australia. Ultimately, the Australian people are going to look at Mr Rudd and say, ‘These were his promises before the 2007 election and nothing good—