Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you on behalf of Senator Xenophon! You are probably just misunderstanding how the process works. My understanding is that you do not pay any more at the bowser. The bowser price is the bowser price. You actually claim it when you do your BAS, whether it is on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. It is about the rebate that you get back. I think that probably mitigates on two fronts: firstly, I thought Senator Xenophon was answering his own question, to be honest, when he said that the Senate can get its act together fairly quickly; and, secondly, because of the way the BAS system works, the combination of the Senate getting its act together and the BAS rebate actually mitigates that fairly substantially, I would have thought.