Page 2079 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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Chief Minister say, when she launched the Small Business Awards, that it is the small to medium sized businesses that have kept this country going. I know that it has kept me going. If I was a great big cartel, I could not have kept going. The small businessman will accept a temporary reduction in his profit and a reduction in his wages, a reduction in his income. He will want to hang onto his employees because they are his bread and butter, his lifeline, and he will be fighting for them.
What you are doing, Mr Minister, is killing the small business. You are not killing the giant oil operators; you are killing the small operators. If that is what you want to achieve, Mr Minister, go ahead. As somebody with some experience in this field, with experience in business for something like 45 years, I beg you: You are on the wrong track and you should have second thoughts. There is no way that I can support this Bill.
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (6.01): Very briefly, Madam Speaker, I want to relay a very interesting discussion I had the other day with a couple of petrol station owners. Contrary to what Mr Moore said about what petrol station owners would or would not be willing to accept, they were claiming that it was not the maximum retail price they had a problem with. It was not even the margin they had a problem with. They would be quite willing to accept that, if they could be confident that the wholesale price could be kept at the level at which the Minister would like it to be. They explained to me and others who were there what happens when petrol companies refuse to sell to them under certain circumstances. Their concern, and I think it has to be understood, is what happens if the petrol wholesalers refuse to sell in the ACT. It is fine if their margin is kept; but, if their retail price is capped and the petrol companies will sell to them only at New South Wales prices in Sydney, what happens to them? Will the Minister guarantee that the margin is maintained, even if they cannot buy petrol in the ACT at the price the Minister sets?
Interestingly, if the Minister would guarantee to petrol station owners in the ACT a margin that is acceptable to all, he would find that a lot of the complaints we have on this side would evaporate immediately. It is not that we oppose a retail petrol price. It is not what we would like. But, equally, we do not like petrol prices in the ACT, and we agree that it is totally inequitable for ACT people to be paying what they are in comparison to just about everywhere else. Our concern is that, unless you on the opposite side of the house can guarantee that margin to retail operators, they are going to go out of business. If you can do that, we will reassess our position.
MR DE DOMENICO (6.03): Mrs Carnell, Mr Humphries and Mr Westende said it all. The Government has to realise that, if it thinks it can control the big oil companies selling in New South Wales, it is wrong. For Mr Connolly to say, "Yes, we will broad-brush it, and there is the cross-border thing" is rubbish. Mr Connolly has a disconcertingly untrustworthy attitude to the Prices Surveillance Authority. If that is his attitude, he should lobby his colleague Mrs Kelly and the Government to change Professor Fels from that position. Perhaps that is what you ought to be doing, if that is what you think.
It is a fact, Mr Connolly, and Mr Westende said it, that the increase in petrol prices which occurred last Friday resulted from the accumulation of a series of price increases approved by the Prices Surveillance Authority. It was not approved by anybody else; it was approved by the Prices Surveillance Authority.
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