Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

During the great fire of Rome in AD 64, the historian Seutonius tells us that the Emperor Nero played the lyre while his city burned. And in the best imperial tradition, our pretentious Prime Minister is similarly engaged in a game of trivial pursuit during a crisis.

The American economy is in a shambles. The European markets are in utter disarray. The ASX has plummeted farther and faster than at any time over the past three years. Business confidence throughout Australia is the lowest in over a decade. The prosperity of millions is at risk like at no time since the Great Depression.

And what does the Prime Minister offer us? What solution to our economic woes does Kevin 07 provide in 08? Well, among his overseas jaunts; among his speeches at the UN, and his hobnobbing with the global glitterati; the Prime Minister has offered us a panacea to our petrol pump pain.

This Hail Mary manoeuvre goes by the name of Fuelwatch. But Fuelwatch is nothing more than bread and circuses. It is nothing more than a gigantic distraction. The Prime Minister’s Fuelwatch policy is like the chariot race scene out of Ben Hur. The only difference is that it is the Australian people who are in danger of being devoured, not by lions, but by the bear market.

Before last year’s election, Kevin Rudd promised new thinking on the question of fuel costs. Wayne Swan promised to “crack down” on “skyrocketing petrol prices.” During their election courtship dance to win the votes of the Australian public, Rudd and co. promised effective action to reduce prices at the pump. But now that those votes were firmly in their party’s pocket, the Labor Government is trying to pass off a mere website as a solution to this problem that has inflicted so much pain to Australian hip pockets. The government contends that this scheme will ease the squeeze on motorists by informing the public of where fuel prices are lowest in their area. And petrol stations would be obligated to set their prices for a 24 hour period, on pain of a hefty fine.

In other words Fuelwatch is a giant government-mandated price-fixing scheme. And price-fixing constitutes the antithesis of competition. The Coalition Critique of the Labor’s interim report on Fuelwatch in the Senate Economics Committee explained this basic economic principle as follows:

“Fuelwatch, with its requirements to fix a price a day in advance and then to hold that price for 24 hours, does not make the market more competitive, and tends to a higher average price.”

Now, few have ever argued that the former trade union hacks who dominate the Labor government are endowed with a sense of economic sophistication. Few have ever argued that economic management is the ALP’s strong suit. But even economic semi- literates who occupy the government front bench should be aware that constraints on competition will raise prices rather than lower them. Even an economic dilettante like Treasurer Wayne Swan should understand that anything that reduces the flexibility of the fuel market will only make petrol dearer.

And then there are the gaping inconsistencies in the government’s claims about the benefits that Fuelwatch will supposedly provide. First you have the Prime Minister, who asserted that the scheme would bring about a reduction of 1.9 cents per litre in the “relevant weekly average price margin.” Then Labor’s petrol Tzar, Pat Walker, who walked off the job after only four months, claimed that the national implementation of the scheme would lower prices by 5 cents per litre. And finally, you have the Treasurer himself, who is peddling the Fuelwatch fish story that motorists will save $10 per tank, which works out to a whopping 20 cents per litre. So which is it? 1.9 cents per litre? 5 cents per litre? Or 20 cents per litre? This government is the political equivalent of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They can’t even get the lines straight on their Fuelwatch sales pitch.

But I must note that all is not entirely lost where the Rudd Government’s economic comprehension is concerned. There is at least one member of the Labor ministry who understood that Fuelwatch is a triumph of style over substance. There is one member of Kevin Rudd’s front bench who understood that the Fuelwatch scheme would harm Australian consumers rather than help them. And Labor Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism Martin Ferguson was not reticent about his concerns.

In a confidential letter published last May by The Australian, Ferguson warned his colleagues that Fuelwatch would fail working families and hurt the small business sector. But the publication of Martin Ferguson’s letter was merely the first Fuelwatch related leak.

Pretty soon Kevin Rudd’s Fuelwatch agenda began to look like the hull of the Titanic after that meeting with the iceberg. Channel Nine’s Laurie Oakes came into possession of internal cabinet documents that cast serious doubt on Fuelwatch. Now, I don’t wish to digress from the topic of this debate into what these leaks say about the modus operandus of the Rudd government. But there must be something seriously wrong for such serious breaches of confidentiality to occur so early in a young government’s tenure.

Yet beyond the question of how these documents reached the public domain, it is far more germane to see precisely what they say about Labor’s Fuelwatch initiative. Kevin Rudd’s own department, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, said: “econometric modelling undertaken by the ACCC is somewhat inconclusive with respect to the overall pump price, but indicates that a small overall price increase cannot be ruled out”. And the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism expressed concern that “the scheme will reduce competition and market flexibility, increase compliance costs and has more potential to increase prices.” No wonder that Department’s own Minister, Martin Ferguson, had second thoughts about the wisdom of Kevin Rudd’s Fuelwatch media stunt.

The Prime Minister claims that Fuelwatch is modelled on a similar government scheme in Western Australia, which Kevin Rudd claims was a raging success. But local fuel market analysts tell a different story.

“It was the introduction into Perth of Woolworths and particularly Coles which actually triggered the price war that occurred in Perth,” said West Australian analyst Alan Cadd. And so we see that it was competition, rather than the heavy hand of government mandates, that caused petrol prices in Perth to drop by 2.5 cents per litre.

Labor’s Fuelwatch media stunt is an insult to the intelligence of the Australian people. It is a gratuitous boondoggle that has already cost the Australian taxpayer thousands, perhaps even millions of dollars. The Fuelwatch media stunt is entirely unnecessary because the private sector has already moved to provide free information on fuel prices to anyone with a computer.

MotorMouth Pty Ltd. is a company that was established in July 2000 in response to the demand by Australian motorists for information on the fluctuating prices of unleaded petrol. It was initially set up to cover the major routes within a 15-kilometre radius of the Brisbane CBD. Ralph Waldo Emerson once quipped that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. And the quality of the service provided by the MotorMouth website caused many thousands of Australian consumers to travel the pathways of the internet in search of a better deal.

The MotorMouth is entirely independent from the oil companies. And its website declares that its core objective is the provision of information to consumers to facilitate informed decision making on petrol purchases. Increased demand for MotorMouth’s petrol price monitoring service soon triggered its expansion to the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth.

MotorMouth is simply a voluntary conduit for consumer information. It has no power to fix prices and impose fines like Kevin Rudd’s Fuelwatch media stunt. And thus the private sector MotorMouth serves to nurture competition while Labor’s government Internet white elephant serves to neuter it.

So it turns out that Kevin Rudd’s great innovation to provide salvation for Australian motorists isn’t so innovative after all. It turns out the private sector beat the Prime Minister to the punch by years. It turns out that MotorMouth trumped Kevin Rudd’s bigmouth by a large margin.

There is a saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. And the Rudd Government is rushing, with great fanfare, through a gaping door left wide open long ago by MotorMouth Pty Ltd.

But this is a classic pattern with this Rudd Labor government. This is a government values form over function; chicanery over honesty; and the appearance of action over the reality of action. And it has no hesitation about claiming credit for the hard work done by others. This whole scheme is a hoax, a put up job, a gigantic humbug that richly deserves to be described as Kevin Rudd’s Fuelwatch media stunt.

With this government I am reminded of that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her companions discover that things in the Emerald City aren’t as they first appear. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” says the Wizard while he is exposed as a fraud.

But you can rest assured that we in the Coalition will pay close attention to what goes on behind the curtains of this government. That is what we were sent here to do by the Australian people who elected us.