Page 3600 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 19 October 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The Government professes to want to create jobs in the ACT. It also says that it wants to make sure that industry and others in the ACT are capable of sustaining job growth. Clearly, this Bill will cost jobs. It will cost the jobs generated in the primary producing sector, in the construction industry sector, and in the sector that distributes diesel products at the present time. The Government claims to want to help business thrive, to let business get on with the job. This diesel fuel increase is no more than an attack on business since it is, in many cases at least, business which will pay this increase.
Most importantly of all, this Government professes again and again to have a concern about social justice, but the measures that are being debated tonight fly in the face of social justice. In fact, they constitute a direct hit on low income earners in the ACT. It is very often poor people, self-funded retirees, people with large families, who have diesel fuel heated homes, and they will have to find that extra $105, $110, $140 a year to pay these additional charges. The Chief Minister has described the 2,500 homes in the ACT which use diesel fuel for heating as a "very small number". But 2,500 homes in the ACT is not a small number; it is a significant cross-section of the ACT. This Government apparently has abandoned social justice as far as that 2 per cent, or whatever they think it might be, is concerned. It seems to me that social justice applies no matter how few the number of people you are talking about might be.
I see this as a desperate, half-thought-through grab for dollars, and I believe that there is a very great chance that this measure will be ineffective. At the present time in both the ACT and New South Wales there is a general exemption for off-road uses of diesel fuel; that is, any person who uses diesel fuel for off-road purposes is entitled not to have to pay the 7.08c per litre franchise fee that is payable by on-road users. That includes particularly people in the farming sector, people in industry, and people who use diesel fuel for home heating purposes.
The Chief Minister said today that only a small percentage of the total number of certificates of exemption issued in the ACT related to industry, and that is quite true. Of the 2,599 certificates of exemption granted in the ACT in the period from 1 November 1992 to 6 October 1993, only 172 related to industry, compared with 53 for farming and 2,374 for residential. The Chief Minister quoted percentages to indicate the number of people who had exemptions from the diesel fuel franchise fee. But what she did not quote was the total number of litres purchased using those exemption certificates, and that paints a very different picture indeed. I think the Chief Minister said that only about 5 per cent of the certificates related to industry.
Ms Follett: Two per cent.
MR HUMPHRIES: Two per cent; I beg your pardon. Two per cent related to industry, but approximately 66 per cent of the total litreage used under those certificates relates to industry. In other words, the 53 farming exemptions result in the purchase of 243,000-odd litres; the 2,374 residential exemptions give you 3,500,000-odd litres; but the 172 industrial exemptions give you approximately 8,652,000 litres of fuel each year. So notwithstanding what the Chief Minister said earlier today, there is a very large impact on industry in the ACT that uses diesel fuel. That is principally the construction industry, where it is used for large earth-moving equipment and other machinery.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .