Page 2073 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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This legislation, the Government seems to think, will see pressure placed on the major oil companies. Apparently a gun held at the head of the retailers will bring some concessions from the wholesalers. This assumes, of course, Madam Speaker, that the wholesalers have a more benevolent attitude to the retailers than they have to the rest of us Canberrans. All I can say is: Dream on, Mr Connolly. Madam Speaker, price control went out with commissars, Zil limousines and five-year plans. As a tool for social objectives, it is unfair and indiscriminate and, over a long period of time, undermines the very motivation for people being involved in job and revenue creating enterprise in this Territory, or anywhere else for that matter. People in this Territory have put often large sums of money into investments designed to put bread and butter on their tables. They have entered the retail petrol market under a certain set of conditions. Those conditions, at the whim of government, are about to change. I am saddened to think that this Government cannot understand how fundamentally inequitable and unfair it is that a change should occur in those circumstances.
It is reprehensible that this Government should proceed down a path which will result in so many people suffering such damage. The Government acknowledges, by the reference that the Minister made in his speech yesterday, that there is some question of compensation. There is a question of the loss that people already in the market will suffer by virtue of this Government's decision to introduce new competitors at artificially low prices. The Minister pointed out that some submissions argued that compensation should be paid to existing service station owners, but he went on to say that, in his view:
... it is not in the public interest nor is there any legal or moral obligation on the Government to make such payments -
that is, compensation payments -
and, indeed, it is the Government's view that no such payments should be made ...
That, Madam Speaker, is intrinsically unfair. Maybe there is no legal obligation, but there certainly is a moral claim. Should players in a market have to cop any whim of government, any decision however arbitrary, however mandatory, the Government may care to make that affects their livelihoods? Surely the better decision is not to make those arbitrary and random decisions in the first place.
Madam Speaker, the Government's approach through this legislation does not address the real issues. There are, and there have been for some time, mechanisms in place for monitoring petrol prices, and indeed other prices paid by Canberrans for goods that they purchase. The principal mechanism is the Prices Surveillance Authority. From time to time the Prices Surveillance Authority examines petrol prices. The most recent comprehensive inquiry it made into petrol pricing in the ACT was in 1991. Its conclusions were summarised in a paper which it presented and in a press release which it produced at that time. Madam Speaker, it is worth just reminding the Assembly of the headline of that press release in August 1991: "PSA considers petrol price controls not desirable in Canberra". That was the view of the PSA in 1991.
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