Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Resources, Forestry and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to address the Prime Minister’s ministerial statement on the issue of energy. If one goes through his lengthy speech—big on the number of words but little on potential impact on the Australian community—one will note that the Prime Minister’s energy statement will effectively cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. The problem is that it does nothing on one of the major challenges confronting Australia: our reliance on imported oil from unstable parts of the world like the Middle East. It will certainly do nothing to put downward pressure on petrol prices. So it fails two very key tests: how we do something about petrol prices and, perhaps more importantly in the medium term, how we front up to putting in place a process which allows us to become less reliant on unstable oil from the Middle East.

Before I come to the statement, let me remind members that there has been an important debate in the parliament this week on the Petroleum Retail Legislation Repeal Bill 2006, a bill that repeals the outdated sites and franchises acts and will hopefully free up competition in the petrol retail sector. The opposition believes that this bill is more likely to put downward pressure on petrol prices than anything in the Prime Minister’s energy statement, yet I must report to the House that, despite the importance of this bill, only the Minister for Industry, Resources and Tourism, Ian Macfarlane, and two other coalition members bothered to speak on it. For all the posturing of the government, both the Liberal Party and the National Party—actually the National Party could not even get one speaker—do not care. The bill included consideration of petrol stations potentially carrying ethanol. It is clearly a public statement by the National Party that they do not care about petrol prices in the bush. From the Liberal Party point of view, they do not care at all generally in Australia.

There were three speakers from the coalition government from a caucus of 87. They could not even do better than the three Independents in the House with respect to the number of speakers on the bill. This compares to the 23 who spoke on the Labor Party side out of a caucus of 60. I think this shows who is prepared to put the time into this House and debate the issues that are of major concern to the Australian community. I suppose they were all in their rooms getting ready to rort the increase in publications entitlements of $125,000 or $150,000. When I was elected in 1996, the average expenditure by members of parliament was about $33,000.

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