David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to reflect some of the feedback coming in from people here in Canberra, people in the ACT, whom I represent. I want to start with the cost of living and in particular the price of petrol here in Canberra, which has just topped $2 a litre.

This week the Prime Minister celebrated 30 years in the parliament. That is a huge contribution in terms of public service, and he's clearly achieved a lot. But it's also three decades since he's had to pay for his own tank of petrol on any kind of regular basis, and I think we need to keep that in mind as parliamentarians. I worry that some in the government have lost touch with how acute the day-to-day cost-of-living concerns of the people we're here to represent are. I know Minister Bowen's advice to Australians was to not panic-buy petrol. That's easy to say but harder to do when you see the price of petrol climbing as it is. I really welcome the comments from the Treasurer today saying that he's written to the ACCC asking them to monitor the situation, but I would respectfully ask the government to please do more. We have to do more for Australians.

I'll pre-empt the argument from the government and say, yes, we know that the Australian government can't single-handedly solve the crisis in the Middle East, but I think there are things that we can do here, and we can do them now. We're being warned that petrol prices could jump up 40 cents a litre due to the conflict in Iran, with prices increasing even before wholesale costs have risen, and that should concern us in our concentrated market. That is some serious profit—if you're increasing costs now even before you're passing on the added wholesale costs. Canberra and Darwin already have the highest petrol prices in the country, on average paying four cents or so more per litre to fill up. That's almost 20 million bucks a year in Canberra.

Let's look at some of the solutions to these very legitimate grievances. Firstly, we could commit to implementing a national open real-time fuel-price reporting standard and taking enforcement action if companies exploit this crisis. In an environment ripe for price gouging, we know we have a competition issue in many sectors of the Australian economy. Markets only work when they are transparent and competitive and companies face swift and severe penalties from profiting unethically.

We could also do more to support the creation of an affordable second-hand EV market. One of the biggest risks of the energy transition is the risk that it entrenches the growing wealth divide and inequality in this country. There will be thousands and thousands of Australians, at the moment, driving past the local servo and smiling because they have an EV and they can charge it at home for 10 or 15 bucks or they can charge it from their solar for free. We have to make sure that we leave no-one behind here and that we're actually ensuring that low-income households can actually benefit from the transition. We could also impose 25 per cent on gas exports. Prices are about to go through the roof. If you look at the gas futures market, there are huge, huge increases. We should get a return on that gas. These gas companies have done nothing special to command that extra profit. Australians should get a cut of that. That's revenue that is desperately needed here in Australia.

Finally, on the energy transition, I want to talk briefly about artificial intelligence. It seems every day we've got a new story about jobs being lost to AI—the opportunity the government talks about. But, while there might be opportunities, there are also risks to privacy, risks to jobs, risks to water and risks to energy. We see that water demand for data centres in Sydney alone will exceed the total drinking water used in Canberra within the next decade, and we are seeing more and more data centres being built. I'm not hearing anything from the Labor government about safeguards and about how we ensure that we're not increasing the price of electricity and that we're not using valuable drinking water. These are very legitimate questions, and they deserve answers from the Albanese Labor government.