House debates

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

National Fuelwatch (Empowering Consumers) Bill 2008; National Fuelwatch (Empowering Consumers) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008

Second Reading

1:02 pm

Photo of Ian MacfarlaneIan Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak in favour of the amendment to the National Fuelwatch (Empowering Consumers) Bill 2008 and to try to cast some sensible debate back into this chamber following the last speaker. It amuses me, and of course it alarms me, that we have on that side of the House people who pretend to go by the title of economic conservatives yet every time I stand at this dispatch box and speak I am following a speaker who displays little or no understanding of how a commercial market works. They want to intervene in the way in which we know Labor governments of the past have continually intervened, to the detriment not only of the market but also of the consumers and, of course, ultimately of the economy. You need to have a free market, to have normal economic levers. I know that some who sit opposite—not all but some—have socialist backgrounds and we know that socialist economies are centrally planned economies. I know we have got a centrally planned government; I know that everything that happens in this place goes across the desk of the Prime Minister first. But I think we need to think long and hard before we take our economy back to being a centrally planned economy.

I listened very carefully to the member for Lindsay during his address, which I think went for about 12 minutes. Of course, there was the mandatory slur on big oil and all of that. That is just par for the course and happens every time a Labor Party member stands up. They attack anyone who is successful, even Australian companies, even little companies that started in little towns in Victoria like Woodside, which was actually named after the town of Woodside. Those companies took a battering yesterday and I guess they will get a battering at some other stage as well, although that debate was guillotined. But anytime a person from the Labor Party speaks they will always have a slap at anyone who is successful commercially in Australia.

What I did notice from the member for Lindsay was that in the 12 minutes of his address I would guess that probably 8½ or nine minutes of that speech were all about transparency and information in the market. I say ‘hear, hear’ to that. If that is what this legislation was about then we would not be having this debate; we would just wave it through. We would not need the Leader of the House to come in and guillotine the debate, because we would agree. In fact, that is what our amendment says: if there is the process to provide more information to the consumer, whether it is by the internet or by SMS or by satnav or by simply putting up signs, then we are all for that. But I was a bit perplexed by one of his comments where he said that if you put up information on the internet you would not be able to change it for 24 hours. He must have a different version of the internet than I have, because one of the things I do when I am in my office is check what is going on not only in Australia but in the world, and of course most importantly what is going on in Queensland at the moment—particularly in relation to the rain. The member for Lindsay should try it when he goes back to his office; he may be there already. He will notice that stories on the ABC website are updated regularly; in fact some of them are updated half-hourly. So a system whereby the price of fuel changes during the day as a reaction to normal market forces does not preclude that system from having updated information on the internet. And any of those members either opposite or behind me who have daughters, and probably sons as well—I have only daughters—would know that SMSs can be rattled out at a furious speed and that that information could easily be updated.

So this is just a nonsense. It is just a fallback to the Labor Party’s centrally-planned economy ways. They believe that you cannot have a scheme where the consumers can be empowered, where information can be provided but where you cannot interfere in the market. They just do not believe that those sorts of things go together. That is part of the modern future. Perhaps this scheme that they are promoting at the moment, which will cost every motorist in Australia money and make it much easier for those people those on the other side fear most—that is, the oil companies—to operate. If you talk to the oil companies, if you talk to the retailers of fuel, they think Fuelwatch is great, they love it. They know exactly how much they are going to get for their commodity. They deliver it to the site, they sell it in the next 24 hours, they know before they start exactly what their return is going to be on it. But that is to the detriment of motorists. We are able to put forward a scheme where you do have transparency, where the market delivers the normal commercial forces that see discounts on fuel on Tuesdays, where we see consumers able to manage their fuel budgets as much as they can in a market that continues to rise—you can do all of those things without intervening in the market and fixing the price of fuel under the pretence of fixing the cost of fuel to motorists.

The coalition support widespread consumer information on petrol prices, but we do not support the uncompetitive, consumer punishing price fixing element of Fuelwatch. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this bill because it gives me the opportunity to highlight what is a scam by the Australian government on the motoring public. It has already become all too clear to Australians that this government is a government of smoke and mirrors and illusion. But, unfortunately for Australia, the Prime Minister has shown his true colours too late—that is, after the election. He was elected on the pretext that he would bring down the costs of living for Australian families. I was out there in the electorates when the now Prime Minister was campaigning, and I can assure you that that was the message that the voters were picking up—that, if elected, a Rudd government would make petrol cheaper, would make groceries cheaper and would keep the costs of living for Australian working families down. In their eyes he promised to bring down inflation, he promised to bring down the price of groceries and he promised to bring down the price of petrol. What has happened is that he has now been shown to be a complete fraud on that.

The government has been trumpeting the Fuelwatch scheme as the solution for families and motorists, but in actual fact it is nothing of the sort. It would have been one thing to say that, if we had seen any of these things succeed, in any place in Australia, then we would at least have a little confidence in what is being put forward. But the truth of the matter is that there has been no solution from FuelWatch in Western Australia. We are seeing a situation where fuel in Perth on average is higher than it is in other states. There is no reason for that other than the fact that the market has been prevented from working, and motorists in Western Australia are paying more.

On the evidence that has been put forward in this House by the opposition the Fuelwatch scheme has descended into a debacle. It is a classic example of spin at the expense of substance. The government in doing so has traded its obligation for real governance in favour of cheap words and stunts. The unfolding farce surrounding Fuelwatch has exposed the Rudd Labor government for exactly what it is: little more than a mirage built on the foundations of spin and superficial style. It has become all too clear that this government never intended to live up to its promises, the promises it threw around so freely in the lead-up to the last election. A silver-tongued Prime Minister has known all along that he has no silver bullet, to use his words, to bring the price of petrol down. That is not the impression he gave before the election. As he travelled backwards and forwards across Australia last year, he built up that expectation and deliberately fed the belief that he had an idea and a plan for Australian motorists. The truth has been exposed now, and it shows that this government’s Fuelwatch plan is no more than a face-saving exercise that will not save anything for those people whom it should save—that is, Australian motorists. It is a cover for a shallow, self-obsessed, media driven government that has little regard for the people who have entrusted it to office, a cabinet comprised of political slaves to a public relations exercise who are now turning on each other, as we have seen, with damaging leaks.

The wheels are well and truly coming off this sham called Fuelwatch. It is for no other reason than it is just that: a sham. There is no substance to this scheme. There is no substance to telling motorists that, if we fix the price of petrol for 24 hours, it will be cheaper. There is absolutely no substance to that statement at all. We know of course that even in the Labor cabinet there are those who saw the potential damage that this scheme could cause. There was the Minister for Resources and Energy, whose comments have been widely spread in the past few weeks. I think one of the most interesting things I saw last week was a short piece on the Minister for Resources and Energy that said he was a man of honesty and integrity and a man who says it like it is. He certainly said it like it is. I think the same piece said that he perhaps was not the best politician around. I am not sure about that. I think that anyone who is honest with the public, anyone who strongly represents the views of the people that he represents, will be seen as a good politician. He stood up very strongly against this scheme and made it clear that this scheme would actually drive petrol prices up and make the situation even tougher for families and small businesses. So we have a minister here with common sense.

Of course he was not the only minister in that room; there was the ‘accidental Treasurer’ and there was probably the ‘minister for  career advancement at all costs’. At least we had one minister who we know spoke out. Of course, we know that another minister, had he repeated the advice—and I always have hopes for the finance minister that he actually does understand the economy, and he is one of the few on that side who does—and spoken out on this issue, then he would have supported the advice that we know was given to him by his department. In fact four departments gave advice on this. In that advice—although we have only seen bits of one piece of it—we know that the departments saw the advantages of greater transparency in giving the motorists as much information as they could by giving them the confidence that they knew as much about what was happening in the petrol market as those selling it. I think that is all good. But we also know that four different departments, who are entrusted to give the government non-political, balanced advice, all opposed this scheme. Of course, when anyone gives this government advice that is contrary to their political goal, they are dismissed from the field immediately. We saw a situation where the Treasurer described them as ‘mere bureaucrats’.

One of the privileges of being in this place for me was that during the last government I was a minister. One of the great delights to me as a minister was to have departments made up of professional people—people as professional in their field as any professionals in any field I have seen. They took their jobs very seriously. They gave their advice on the basis that it was the best advice they were able to provide—not to produce a political outcome, not to produce spin, not to try and be part of this smoke and mirrors government that we have now but to actually just say, ‘I am a professional. I have been educated in these areas, I have experience in these areas and this is my honest opinion about what I think will happen.’

Those on the other side continue to attack the Public Service. The Public Service are just that: they are there to serve the public. The sorts of attacks we saw from the Treasurer, and then from the Prime Minister, on the Public Service sends a shiver down the spine of anybody who has any respect for the worthiness of others and for the professional advice that I know comes from those departments. Those who deem to be the government of this country now on the basis of economic conservatism proceeded to dismiss all that good advice from all those departments and from all those professionals by waving them away as ‘just bureaucrats’. I think that in itself should tell the people of Australia that there is an unwillingness within this government to take any advice that does not add to its political gain and its political spin. Before I move away from these comments from these professionals, from these public servants, who are there to serve the people of Australia as much as we are, I will just quote one department, and that is the Prime Minister’s very own department. The department are said to have stated explicitly, ‘The proposed scheme will also result in an increase in the compliance burden in the economy, with Treasury estimates indicating that the proposed scheme will result in ongoing increased operating costs of around $4,000 per annum to affected small businesses.’ Not only do we have a scheme that will cost motorists more and not only do we have a scheme that is going to completely distort the normal economic forces; we have a scheme that is going to put extra burden on the small businesses of Australia.

When he came to power the Prime Minister said that he desired frank and fearless advice for his government. But when he gets it he does not want it. He denigrates the very people who give it. Today his claim of being a Prime Minister who will accept frank and fearless advice is in tatters, as is the credibility of this scheme. The Australian public can have no confidence in Fuelwatch and they can have no confidence in this government. The manipulations and games have gone on for too long. It is about time this government came clean with the Australian people. It has to admit that it does not have the answers. It has to admit that it is not able to deliver on the promises it falsely made last year as it tried so desperately to gain government. If the Australian government does not have a plan for Australia and it does not know what it is doing on petrol prices then I think we have much to fear in the years ahead as this government continues to put politics and spin above substance.

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