Page 2076 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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Mr Lamont: The Bill allows us to go after the wholesale price.
MR HUMPHRIES: Madam Speaker, you cannot get the wholesale price paid in Sydney. You might get it in Sydney, but you cannot get it in Canberra, and that is the price we are talking about here, Mr Lamont. Madam Speaker, let us assume that the Minister regulates petrol prices over a long weekend. What is to stop people, after that long weekend, putting up their prices to recoup that loss? You cannot use this legislation just on long weekends; you have to use it all the time. It will not work. Closed economies abandoned price control a long time ago. Look at the ACT. We are going down the path of doing that very thing.
Madam Speaker, nobody supports higher petrol prices, but we want to see real solutions to the problems. The Government's solutions are not solutions at all. You fly in the face of the Prices Surveillance Authority; you fly in the face of your own report on petrol pricing. For goodness sake, realise when you are on the wrong track.
MR MOORE (5.46): That was an interesting speech. It is interesting that the Liberals so often go for the free market solution and businesses so often go for the free market solution, until they are the ones on the receiving end. Then they are the first ones back in to say, "What can you do about so and so?". I have read with interest the report of the ACT Government Working Group on Petrol Prices. I have also read letters from various people. This one says that we ought not to proceed with this legislation. It is a letter from Shell, which says that Shell remains firmly opposed to the enactment of the Bill. This one from BP states:
Accordingly, BP strongly recommends that the ACT Government does not proceed with the Fair Trading Bill 1992.
Mr Humphries is right in drawing attention to the fact that it seems that the retailers here are often caught in the middle. I am sure that that is something the Minister is particularly conscious of. I cannot quite put my hand on it, but my memory tells me that we are looking at petrol companies with a profit of some 43 per cent and the profit for a retailer being around 5 or 6 per cent. In fact, that is far less profit than they get on milk, which is at about 10 per cent, and most service stations in the ACT sell milk. The price of milk, of course, is rapidly closing in on the price of petrol; we would not be surprised to see some people attempting to drive cows.
The important thing here is that the Bill does provide for disallowance. Mr Humphries is suggesting that the Minister will use the power just on the long weekends. If there is any good time to use it, that would be the appropriate time. Quite clearly, what is happening is that, somehow or other, we can manage to put the prices up on the long weekends and then bring them back down again. We have seen it happen on many occasions. It seems to me that the real problem associated with the Bill is giving to the Minister the power to control the prices not just for petrol but also for the service stations, and this chamber may well wonder whether the Minister will use that power responsibly. The check, as in the checks we have for most things, is that on the very next sitting day somebody could move for disallowance and bring that into play. So the worst case scenario, if we think the Minister is acting irresponsibly, is that there will be eight weeks where prices would be controlled in an inappropriate way. That would be the worst case, because this Assembly is required to sit every two months.
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