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

I understand the coalition government’s concerns about the rorting of entitlements, because it also reflects badly on their failure to debate issues. Rather than debating issues in the House, they are more concerned about rorting entitlements, with over $200,000 in an election year available to try to spin an alternative story about petrol throughout the households of their electorate. As far as I am concerned this represents a corruption of the Australian political system and is something we should all be ashamed of. It is double-dipping. There is public funding available to political parties in Australia. This is absolute corruption, in my mind.

Having said that, I also want to discuss some other serious issues about the government’s performance. The Labor Party moved amendments to strengthen the ACCC’s powers and to strengthen the Trade Practices Act to provide greater scope for dealing with abuse of market power as well as to promote new and expanded domestic fuel industries. Despite the practical importance of these amendments to give consumers confidence that the prices they are paying are fair and reasonable in the short term and to reduce our reliance on foreign oil in the long term, only Minister Macfarlane from the government side bothered to show up to debate these issues. The problem is that when the minister got tired of it, he guillotined the debate. Imagine guillotining a debate about petrol in Australia. With ordinary motorists and households doing it very tough at the moment, they were not even prepared to let the debate go on in the House. He sat down, dismissed the amendments and basically said, ‘We’re not interested in further debating how we get a better deal for Australian consumers.’

These amendments would be able to put downward pressure on petrol prices and to provide for Australia’s long-term energy security far more than the Prime Minister’s energy statement. Let us go to some of those issues. Firstly, let us deal with LPG. The opposition is a great supporter of LPG. It was the Labor Party that proposed a rebate in October last year for LPG conversions, so obviously we welcome that announcement. But I am concerned that the details of the implementation of the measure are ill thought out. The Prime Minister says LPG is readily available in 3,200 service stations in Australia and that nearly half of those are in rural and regional areas. The fact is there are 6½ thousand service stations in Australia, so in reality LPG is only available in about one in two. Also, in many parts of regional Australia, the hardest hit by record high petrol prices, there are very few LPG refuelling outlets and it is not possible to obtain a vehicle conversion from petrol to LPG or to obtain servicing for LPG vehicles.

For example, in Western Australia, there are no workshops in Karratha or Port Hedland which deal with LPG conversions. The only option for residents in the north-west is to send their vehicles to Perth for conversion at a transport cost of approximately $7,750 for the round trip of 3,200 kilometres. The Prime Minister has to face up to the fact that it is not just the availability of LPG in rural and regional areas that is a problem. It is also the availability of workshops and skilled people who can do the conversions and repair the vehicles, so a rebate is only part of the question. There is a lot more that the Prime Minister will have to do to make LPG a realistic option in rural and regional Australia.

I am told that the only workshop owner with an LPG conversion licence in Port Hedland does not get enough inquiries to justify setting up his workshop for regular conversions, especially when each conversion takes at least a day. That is only one vehicle per day, and he is the only qualified mechanic at his business. On top of that, he cannot get apprentices and says there is no incentive to compensate him for the time and expense involved in training. He says he has to compete with companies such as BHP paying $30 an hour for basic labour, and customers will not pay that for car maintenance and conversion. He also says that when he finds qualified people, they use his business as a stepping-stone into the mining industry where they can earn up to $120,000 per year plus air fares and subsidised accommodation.

This unfortunately is a reflection on the Howard government’s abject failure to invest in training in the traditional trades over the last decade, and also generally reflects on the fact that too many employers also treated training as a cost rather than an investment and walked away from some of their apprenticeship training responsibilities over the last 10 to 20 years. I simply say: what confidence can the motoring public have that once they commit to LPG the Howard government will not up the tax yet again? I refer to the fact that, since 1996, we have had a variety of changes to the excise rate with respect to LPG.

I also want to go to the issue of ethanol. Far from discrediting the Labor Party, I simply say to the Prime Minister we have always supported the biofuels industry. The House should recall that it was the Keating government that introduced an 18c a litre production bounty for ethanol in the 1993-94 budget in addition to the zero excise rating for the product. It was the Howard government that abolished the bounty scheme one year early, in the 1996-97 budget, and has consistently undermined the industry by changing the playing field on a regular basis over the last 10 years, including having three different positions on excise in the last parliament alone. Nevertheless, the measures to provide incentives for converting retail infrastructure to sell E10 are welcome.

Just as the Prime Minister was forced to adopt Labor’s call to use ethanol in the Commonwealth car fleet last September—following in the footsteps of Labor governments in New South Wales and Queensland—the new measures announced also follow the Queensland government’s lead earlier this year to provide incentives to convert disused tanks to E10.

I now turn to what I think is a real problem, and that is the Renewable Remote Power Generation Program. As the Prime Minister points out, remote and regional communities are doing it tough because not only do they rely on diesel for their transport but also they rely on it for power generation. The Prime Minister has thrown extra money—an extra $123.5 million—at a program which, unfortunately, does not exist, because it basically does not work. In 2004, the government forecast $26.4 million spending on this program for 2005-06 but, interestingly, only spent $2.1 million. Similarly, back in 2004 the forecast for 2006-07 was $18.8 million, yet today just $325,000 is budgeted for 2006-07.

The fact is this program is not working properly and is dramatically underspent. There is no point in allocating another $123.5 million when the money will not be spent. One of the reasons the money is not being spent is that the scheme is not working. This is because remote communities have to pay 50 per cent of the initial investment costs themselves. How can Indigenous communities, where this would be exceptionally important—they are probably in the greatest need of all—afford to do that? They simply cannot and we all know it. The application of this scheme has to be reviewed to try to make it more attractive, especially to remote and regional communities and Indigenous communities, and to make it work on the ground. That is a challenge to all of us, especially those with a special interest in areas such as Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. I ask the Prime Minister to review these fundamental flaws in the program. It is not just about additional money, it is about making the program work.

The extra funding for Geoscience Australia is very welcome, but more needs to be done. I am also disappointed that the government failed to recognise and support the Labor Party’s second reading amendment to the retail repeal legislation which would have gone to flow-through share schemes for smaller operators. I understand that the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources has tried to get the scheme up on about three or four occasions but has been rolled yet again. Smaller fields are not economically attractive to the major players. What that means effectively is that because they can contribute to the national oil production we have to encourage small explorers and developers to look for and exploit these fields. The issue has to be reviewed by the government. The government also needs to review petroleum resource rent tax deductibility for frontier oil exploration. More has to be done yet to retain the integrity and stability of this scheme.

I am also concerned that, yet again, the statement failed to embrace a challenge to Australia in terms of less reliance on imported oil from the Middle East. We are a resource rich country; we are an energy rich country. We are the envy of many countries around the world. I would have thought that we should be seeking to lead the way by embracing some of the new technology, which would not only contribute to our energy security as a nation but also create other opportunities in the world. That is no different from our endeavours to invest, for example, in clean coal technology, which is not only important to Australia but also important to emerging economies such as China in relation to the challenge of greenhouse emissions. I am dismayed that the Prime Minister’s announcement on gas and coal to liquids on Monday shows that he is out of touch with the potential of this industry. As the editorial in Monday’s Australian newspaper correctly noted, ‘The technology exists to convert gas into high-quality low-polluting diesel fuel.’

A fund for research is naturally welcome, but it will not help develop the industry in Australia. The Prime Minister should support our second reading amendment to call for an immediate feasibility study into gas-to-liquids plants in Australia. He could have dusted off his 2001 gas-to-liquids task force report and actually acted on it. Unlike other alternative fuels, I believe the Prime Minister has done nothing to provide an industry framework to encourage the establishment of industries in Australia to convert our coal and gas resources, which are vast, to clean diesel. This is the new technological challenge we could be confronting and leading the world on in association with places such as Qatar and, in doing so, creating a sense of energy security for Australia which is essentially important. The issue of access to energy and the security of supply is the new Cold War and, if we are not careful, Australia will be left behind yet again. I commend the second reading amendment and the repeal legislation bill to the House. (Time expired)

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