Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The ACCC advise me that normally the divergence is around 60c a litre but from time to time they see this creep up. They advise me that they have seen it rise to as much as 67c a litre. Under the previous government, the ACCC had one policy option to deal with this—begging. They would beg the petrol companies to give the Australian motorists a fair go. Honourable members might recall the newspaper article on the front page of the Daily Telegraph on 16 January 2007 in which the Chairman of the ACCC was reduced to begging the Australian oil companies to reduce their prices and give Australian motorists a fair go.

Under our government there is a different approach. The Chairman of the ACCC and the petrol commissioner actually have some powers. They are not reduced to asking, requesting and begging the petrol companies to explain. On 18 December, less than two weeks after the Rudd government were sworn in, we issued the ACCC with formal monitoring powers, as, during the election campaign, we had committed to do. I can report to the House that the ACCC has used those formal monitoring powers. Recently, when noticing an increase in the divergence between the price of oil in Singapore and the price of petrol in Australia, the commission utilised the powers given to it by the government under part 7A of the Trade Practices Act and wrote to the oil companies under its formal monitoring powers. The ACCC advises me that, after those formal monitoring powers were used, it found that the divergence disappeared and that the difference between the price of oil in Singapore and the price of petrol in Australia returned to usual and normal measures. This is the advice to me from Graeme Samuel, the Chairman of the ACCC.

The government has always said that there are no easy answers to this question. There are no magic bullets and no simple solutions. That is what we said in opposition and that is what we say in government. We also say that we will do everything in our power to ensure there is transparency and competition in the Australian petrol market. We also say that we will not do what they did and ignore the problem. We also say that we will do what they never had the wit to do: we will use every measure in our power to ensure Australian working families get a fair go, that there is competition in the Australian petrol market and that it is not the comfortable oligopoly they let run for 11 years.

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