Page 2082 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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5c and 6c jump in prices in Canberra for four days, dropping back again afterwards. That Easter long weekend was an extortionate exercise in ripping off the ACT consumers. It is something that I suspect the oil companies now regret, because it irrevocably damaged their reputation in Canberra. It was an example of where we would feel absolutely justified in intervening.
Our approach is on two fronts: First, it is to provide price control legislation to allow us to intervene in a way which is accountable to the Assembly. As Mr Moore pointed out, any of those orders are disallowable. Our other thrust is to intervene to get independents into the market. Mr Humphries had two objections to that. One was that it was not a fair competition; we were not allowing everybody in. Of course we are not; we are restricting access to sites to independents. The Canberra Times editorial criticised us and said that we should allow everyone to enter the market for any of those sites. That is what happened in Tuggeranong, where one major oil company purchased the two sites in the Tuggeranong Town Centre.
Mr Moore: For a ridiculous amount of money.
MR CONNOLLY: For an outrageous amount of money. You can see their logos 50 metres away from each other. That is one of the reasons why we have an uncompetitive market. Clearly, we must restrict access to sites. Mr Humphries seems to suggest that by doing that we are forgoing sums of money and therefore it would be cheaper simply to subsidise the sale of petrol in Canberra. That is on the assumption that we are, for all time, losing those sites. As I have made clear, we are intending this to be a short-term process. We can get people into the market on a restrictive form of lease.
The working group report, if members have read it - and I have reason to believe that the Liberals did not read it - indicates that the declared lease technique would be a likely technique for making these sites available. One advantage of the declared lease technique, and I think Mr Moore would be encouraged to hear this, is that it requires instruments to be tabled in this Assembly and to be disallowable. Again, if the Government moves down this path, intervening in the market to attract independents, a very likely way of doing that gives the Assembly some control and accountability over what we do.
If we are doing dirty deals, it is accountable in this Assembly. So again, we have some control; and again, a declared lease gives the Government very extensive powers to control subsequent dealings with the lease and impose conditions on operations on the lease. We can control who is in the site; we can control who controls who is in the site - - -
Mr Kaine: How are you going to do that?
MR CONNOLLY: We can quite easily do that by lease conditions. We can achieve this. The Liberals' other claim was that all of this is unnecessary because the Prices Surveillance Authority said that everything is hunky-dory. If anybody believes what the PSA says - that it is all hunky-dory in the Canberra market - they are pretty isolated. The ordinary Canberra citizen does not think so, and Canberra business does not think so. I received a press release today saying that a certain group supports the Government's tough stance on petrol pricing. It goes on:
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