Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

I might just set out the rationale for this procedure. The first thing to say is, in a substantial sense, this must be dealt with and finalised today or tomorrow. That is the nature of the relationship between the sitting calendar and this set of issues. The rationale for that and the offer of briefings in this set of circumstances have been made to the opposition.

I want to set out what this bill does in order to, I hope, get people in this place to lift a little bit above the partisanship and politics which have characterised the opposition's approach to this set of questions since 2022. This bill supports the government's response to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which is of course impacting fuel prices, affecting Australian businesses in logistics, in the mining industry, and it is affecting ordinary Australians.

Schedule (1) to the bill creates new powers for the Treasurer and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to permit coordinated action during a crisis. In short form, our competition regulatory environment is designed to support maximum competition. What we require is the capacity, should the circumstances arise in those extraordinary circumstances, to make a declaration that those risks to the Australian economy, businesses and consumers, but which fall short of a declared national emergency, require the ACCC to be able to exercise new and streamlined powers to enable those kinds of coordinated responses which will be so important to providing for supply, particularly to regional Australia—particularly to regional Australia.

I think it is extraordinary, having explained that to the Liberals and Nationals and One Nation, that they would contemplate some inquiry process that potentially means that that approach cannot be taken today or tomorrow. That is what is required here. I heard the reference to some of the challenges the previous government dealt with in the COVID context. We can't be prisoners of the past here. What is required here is for a very different set of circumstances.

While the ACCC can make some interim decisions quickly, the legislative requirements, particularly those in relation to consultation and very high thresholds for satisfaction of the ACCC, make the existing class exemption and authorisation powers too slow and inflexible for fast-evolving situations inside the economy that are the result of nothing that Australians, Australian businesses or the Australian government have done but external impacts on the Australian economy. It is too challenging for the ACCC to do what is required to authorise conduct and to respond to economy-wide shocks in a timely manner. It is too difficult. It is too high a threshold. For example, it took more than six months for the ACCC to deliver a final authorisation for supermarkets to coordinate grocery supplies in 2020.

We should actually have a little bit of an adult approach to this set of issues. It has been explained to the coalition. Now is the time to drop the partisanship, the ideology and the resorting to anger and oppositionalism that has got them into the mess that they are in in political terms. They have been the authors of their own destruction.