House debates

Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Matters of Public Importance

Economic Leadership

3:35 pm

Photo of Alex HawkeAlex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

'What about Fuelwatch?' I hear from the backbench. The shadow Treasurer is pretending to ignore this. This is your record, Shadow Treasurer. What about Fuelwatch, a website you could log onto and watch fuel prices change? The private sector economy sorts out at these things much better than government. The private sector economy efficiently manages the prices of retail goods and the price of fuel every day. The problem with your government's policy of putting up websites to watch these prices was that nobody logged on and watched them. You wasted inordinate amounts of taxpayers' money creating websites that nobody logged onto and nobody used—it was a dumb idea from the beginning. It was a dumb idea that was never going to work. You were willing to waste millions of the dollars that you confiscated off hardworking Australians on a flight of fancy so that you could have a site where you could watch the price of groceries.

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