Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

To those in the gallery and my fellow Australians, I say: be wary of a bill that comes to this House rushed and be wary of a bill that comes here at the pace that this has. Before being elected and being given the privilege to represent the people of Wright, I was a transport operator. I had 14 transport depots around the state of Queensland. I employed over 100 people, so it galls me when those on the other side come in here and say no-one understands transport, and that the Liberal Party and the LNP despise unions and despise the transport sector. That gets under my gut.

I don't profess to be a good politician, but I do represent my people well, and I know that what we are debating here at the moment does little to affect my farmers, my transport operators and my growers. In the time remaining on this bill, what we should be talking about—as a government, as an opposition—is fuel excise. We should be talking about the levers that we can pull now. For every litre of fuel, there's 52.6c in fuel excise. We should be discussing what we should be doing with that. We should be having that conversation as mature politicians, but they won't come to the party on it. They won't have that discussion. We should be discussing fuel excise—whether or not we trim it or freeze it all together and give an instant 52.6c off the bowser price as of this afternoon.

And, if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to be asking the next responsible question: what's the opportunity cost? If we've committed to road infrastructure and that money was earmarked to pay for it, what would the unintended consequences be of having to halt road construction as a result of that fuel excise money not flowing? I don't know what the answer is, but let's have that conversation.

Let's have the conversation about maybe even halving the excise and staging it over a period of time. None of us know how long this conflict is going to go on for. The only thing I know is that no-one on the other side is going to bring a solution. And I can assure you that the doubling of penalties will do little or nothing to change the bowser price of fuel in this country—if you can get a litre of fuel!

Yesterday, here in the chamber, we heard the Minister for Climate Change and Energy unashamedly say how many service stations are out of fuel. Now, I don't say that anything other than the conflict in the Middle East is to blame. I'm not here to play the politics. Like I said, I'm not good at that. But I am good at fixing problems. I'm good at getting stuff from A to B. I made a lot of money out of it. And I reckon I could fix this.

I invite the parliament to engage with us, either on the floor of parliament or behind the scenes. I don't care where we have the conversation, but let's start having a conversation about what fuel excise looks like, because we heard member after member on the other side come into this parliament and say, 'We step in when people need help.' Well, that's not help. Doubling the penalties is not help. It won't change the price at all. We need to do something. I'm suggesting the fuel excise has got far more ramification, far more of a sense of instant relief at the bowser—instant relief for my growers.

I've got a distributor up in my electorate. He normally picks up about nine B-double loads from the terminal in Brisbane every week—450 farmers, two shire councils, three bus companies, six servos. Last week, he had two B-double loads. This week, he's been told there's none. The flow-on effects into our community are horrendous. And, if you think we've got problems today, come back in a month's time, when we don't have fuel. They're going to be a lot worse then.

I invite the Prime Minister, the energy minister, anyone who's got carriage of these bills. I will talk to you about a genuine conversation around fuel excise which helps the punter this afternoon.

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