Page 3629 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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Mr Moore: That is the argument you always used with diesel - that we should be the same as New South Wales.
MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Humphries, do not become distracted. Mr Moore, you are out of order.
MR HUMPHRIES: Madam Speaker, if the argument is that we have to be in close parity with New South Wales, that is fine; let us play that consistently across the board. But the argument that the Government has used consistently has been that we have to bring our prices down to the level of New South Wales - not our taxes; but the price of petrol. Surely, therefore, every time the New South Wales price goes up, it is an opportunity to close the gap. We do not do that if, in turn, through taxation measures, we increase our own petrol prices by the same amount; we make the goal of getting closer to New South Wales ever further distant. That is why we should be using this opportunity to reduce ACT tax, not to increase it.
Madam Speaker, the independents have complained about the Government's policies in this area. They have said that it is important that we do something about petrol prices without hitting local retailers. The fact of the matter is that there is only one way of doing that, at least for the foreseeable future, and that is to reduce the levels of government taxation on petrol. It is the only way of doing it fairly. You have not named another way. You are talking about getting stuck into the oil industry, as Mr Connolly puts it. When people talk about the oil industry, they think about the seven sisters - the Texacos, the Shells and the BPs. There are not any of those major companies present in the ACT in any realistic sense. The Government's policies have not reached beyond the ACT. The Government's policies have affected only that part of the oil industry which is manifested by small retailers. That is the point. You cannot talk about a policy that attacks the oil industry when what you really mean is a policy that attacks those small business men and women in the ACT market who have put their savings and their capital into an investment, namely, a petrol station, in the hope of being able to reap some benefits from that process, in accordance with existing government policy.
I know that Government members have chosen to vilify small businesses who operate petrol stations. They think of them as the enemy. They are beyond the pale. They are to be vilified. They are to be damned because they have dared to oppose this Government's will. Nobody observing this process could fail to admit that this Government's policies have been utterly unfairly directed against those particular people.
Madam Speaker, the Government has trumpeted its achievements in this area. The Government claims that it is producing a policy which is to the benefit of all Canberrans, that people know that they are doing the right thing by the people of Canberra, that it is the Liberals who are in the pockets of the "oil industry", so-called, and that it is the Government which is the friend of the motorist. That being so, the Government would be surprised to see that the recent Canberra Times Datacol opinion poll produced a very different view of what this Government was actually achieving in the
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