Page 2072 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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Let me make it quite clear that a number of things suggested in this report, based on changes in the planning arrangements for petrol stations in the Territory, are valuable and could be supported. They deal with things such as where we can put petrol stations - in car parks, adjacent to supermarkets or in conjunction with supermarkets of the kind we see very frequently in Sydney and Melbourne - and allowing more road signs to be put on major roads showing where petrol stations may be found. Those sorts of measures are supportable.
But the measures the Government is proposing to artificially create new competitors in the market are dangerous. Let us suppose, Madam Speaker, that the seven sites that we are referring to here sell for $1m each. We are talking about sites that might be compared with suburban shops in the sort of market they serve and in their location. I think $1m is a very generous price in those circumstances. Let us suppose that in an open auction, an auction not subject to the restrictions being referred to in this paper, the sites would fetch $2m each. That is not an unreasonable supposition. After all, a petrol station in Tuggeranong only two years ago sold for in excess of $3m, so that is not an unreasonable expectation at all. My colleague has just handed me a piece of paper indicating the sorts of prices that have been bid for service station sites in recent years.
Mr Connolly: One company owns two sites in Tuggeranong. That is the problem.
MR HUMPHRIES: Nonetheless, these prices are being paid for petrol stations in the ACT, and you could expect the same prices to be paid again in the ACT if there were an open market. The Government is going to close the market to get this new artificial competition in place, and the result will be that we will certainly suffer a loss of revenue to the Government. If we assume that the seven sites could fetch $2m each but in fact will go for only $1m, the cost to the Government and to the ACT community will be something in the order of $7m. Would it not be just as easy and a measure more capable of delivering a direct benefit to the taxpayer and to the motorists of the ACT if the Government were simply to directly subsidise the cost of petrol with that $7m? It would certainly be a surer and safer way of providing lower prices to Canberra consumers.
Madam Speaker, there is one sure-fire way, at least in the short term, of securing lower prices, and that is to go through with the Fair Trading (Fuel Prices) Bill which is before us today. When we look at the pitfalls and the problems inherent in that legislation, we see what a disaster this entire raft of legislation and other government policy facing us today will be - not just for petrol retailers in the ACT, but for the consumers as well. The Government is pursuing popularity at the expense of commonsense. There is no surer way for Mr Connolly to make himself a hero than by tackling the big bad petrol companies. But is he, or is he in fact targeting other victims of the petrol wholesalers in the ACT rather than the wholesalers themselves? There is no doubt that the principal victims of this Government's policies, both in this legislation and in the papers already presented, will be those men and women who operate petrol station franchises or leases in the ACT, who will be squeezed every time the Government cranks its price control legislation into operation.
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