Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to mention an email that I received from constituents Tim and Renae Smith at about 11 pm on 18 March. They sought to draw to my attention the practice of the Lawnton Shell fuel outlet just south of my electorate. On Tuesday they discovered, on turning up at the petrol station, that the staff had been instructed not to sell any more fuel that day because they were ‘out of petrol’.

I can understand that supply problems occur occasionally, and that perhaps the Lawnton Shell outlet was out of petrol on that day. By coincidence so were a number of Shell outlets in Brisbane and the Gold Coast and, by an even more extraordinary coincidence, it appears that this shortage had spread to Sydney. The Daily Telegraph this morning has quite a bit to say about this extraordinary coincidence:

NRMA president Alan Evans said mysterious fuel shortages ... represented a new “dirty trick” by the oil companies.

I noticed on television last night that the NRMA spokesman said that their tracking suggested that fuel should have been selling in Sydney yesterday at 136c a litre, not the 149c a litre it was being sold for at the time.

The Telegraph editorial this morning has a few words to say about it. It sets out the situation, which is that fuel companies are flexing their muscles prior to the introduction of the fuel commissioner at the end of this month. It says:

... when there is a perception that the oil companies manipulate the market by choking off supplies of high volume retail product to limit sales when prices are low, motorists will feel aggrieved.

And aggrieved they are. The ACCC’s Mr Samuel has gone on to promise that he is going to shame those companies. These companies appear to have no shame whatsoever, and I think we need to look at stronger sanctions against oil companies who behave in this manner. Everybody here has to realise that the people who are most affected by price fluctuations are the people who can least afford to pay. These are the people who have worked their family budgets around buying fuel at the bottom of the fuel price cycle on a Tuesday, and I think it is disgraceful that fuel companies shut down fuel supplies on that particular day.