Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Revenue) Share this | Hansard source

No, I am not going to go there, Member for Lingiari. If you push more people onto LPG then, obviously, over the medium and long term the LPG price will go up as well. This is a policy wrong in isolation and wrong in aggregate. You cannot produce a response to fuel prices and focus on one fuel alone. It is a silly public policy response that will deliver no benefit and no relief to Australian motorists.

What the Prime Minister needed to do was take a holistic and long-term approach to our fuel prices crisis, our increasing dependence on imported fuels, our increasing exposure to the whims of the Middle East and global insecurity and all the problems that that brings. But he chose not to do that. He decided to put it in the too-hard basket and do none of that.

What he should have focused on, and should have been focusing on six or seven years ago, was an eventual shift to a gas based fuels economy—an economy with a wide-ranging mix of LPG, petrol, diesel, CNG, ethanol and biodiesel—and a commitment to converting our abundant reserves and natural gas into liquid diesel fuels. That is something capable of being done today using current technology and it is economically viable while ever the price of oil is $US25 per barrel. Of course, at the moment it is around $US70 and, in recent times, it has been as high as $US75.

It is capable of being done. All we need in this country is some encouragement from the major oil companies. They do not seem willing to go down this path and it is up to this government to push them in that direction by both carrot and stick. By ‘carrot’ I mean the financial incentives to do so, and by ‘stick’ I mean adjusting the regulatory regime to stop oil companies sitting on warehousing and sequencing gas projects to suit their bottom line rather than the national interest.

Another issue surrounding this LPG policy which has been of great interest to me is the extent to which the government is advertising this scheme. Today, all things being well, hopefully there will appear on the Notice Paper some questions from me on this issue. This government is spending millions of dollars advertising a subsidy scheme for which demand will dramatically outstrip supply. Given the media coverage this scheme has had, I doubt that there is a motorist in this country who was not already aware two days after the prime ministerial statement was issued that this subsidy was available, yet we see all this advertising—which costs literally millions of dollars—not just in the Australian Financial Review and the Australian and the other majors but in every regional newspaper I have seen across the breadth of this country in recent weeks. Every newspaper has contained advertisements, costing probably tens of millions of dollars, promoting a flawed scheme which will reach just three per cent of motor vehicles—in other words, which will produce a situation where demand will outstrip supply.

What is the government’s motivation in advertising this scheme so extensively? It is simple. This is a subliminal message. This is an attempt at sending a message to the Australian electorate that the government is doing something about petrol prices in this country by delivering this subsidy scheme. But, as I said, this scheme will do nothing for the 97 per cent of motorists who will not have the opportunity to convert to LPG as a result of this initiative.

It is a disgrace that so much money is being wasted on a scheme already well known and a scheme which most motorists will not have access to anyway. There is no common-sense explanation, other than the one I have given about the political perspective, as to why the government would spend that sort of money advertising a scheme only capable, given the funding that has been directed to it, of reaching three per cent of motor vehicles.

So our challenge to the government is to go back and start again. Our challenge to the Prime Minister is to come back into the parliament and have another go, this time not trying to divert attention by fancy names for the statement but to say, ‘I’m here today to deliver some short-term, medium-term and long-term relief to all those people, all those families and all those businesses, including agricultural businesses, who are suffering under the weight of higher petrol prices.’ His priorities should be, firstly, a regulatory regime that keeps the major oil companies, the wholesalers, the distributors and the retailers honest and stops excessive profiteering. We have shown the way for that process. The Prime Minister has refused to go down that path. His second priority should be a proper policy which goes across the diversity of fuel mixes. In the medium to long term, he should seriously look at our energy dependence or, more importantly, our energy independence and start to get serious about converting the enormous reserves of natural gas we have in this country into liquid diesel fuels.

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