Page 292 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2019
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Eggs and fuel are common, regular items on the shopping lists of many Canberra households. Repeated purchases of these everyday staples add up to significant costs over time. Our community deserve to know what they are paying for when they go to their local retailer to buy these things.
The bill’s provisions relating to fuel price boards will give Canberra drivers confidence that the fuel price advertised outside a service station is the price they will pay at the bowser. By requiring service stations to display the full retail price of fuel on fuel price boards, it means that motorists can no longer be lured into service stations by the display of discounted prices they may not be able to cash in on. Service stations will still be able to advertise discount offers like getting 4c off per litre with a grocery receipt. However, they will not be allowed to display the resulting discounted fuel price on fuel price boards. This means that the board must show the price payable by all consumers before any discount is applied.
I also draw the Assembly’s attention to the bill’s other improvement for ACT motorists: banning service stations from displaying a lower price on a fuel price board than the price displayed at the corresponding pump. This means that Canberra drivers should never pay more at the pump than the price advertised on the board.
The bill is a win for Canberra households but it has also been drafted with the needs of owners and operators of our service stations in mind. To comply with the bill’s changes, select service stations may require new fuel price board signage. In light of these requirements, the bill provides for a delay in commencement of six months before service stations will be required to comply with their new obligations. This will give service station owners enough time to design and install new fuel price board signage.
The bill further supports ACT consumers to make informed choices when purchasing another staple in many Canberra households: free-range eggs. In April 2018, the new Australian Consumer Law (Free Range Egg Labelling) Information Standard took effect across Australia. This standard, introduced by the commonwealth government, sets a mandatory and enforceable national definition of free-range eggs. It also prescribes requirements for their packaging labels and retail display.
The commonwealth information standard permits producers who use maximum stocking densities of 10,000 hens per hectare to label their eggs as free range. This means that eggs produced by hens who have only one square metre of room to themselves can be labelled and sold as free-range.
One square metre per hen is starkly different to the conditions that consumers consider to be free-range. It is also starkly different to the definition of free-range eggs that currently sits on the ACT’s statute book and operated in the territory before the commonwealth information standard superseded it last year. The ACT’s definition was drafted according to best practice animal welfare standards developed by the CSIRO, including a requirement that producers of free-range eggs adhere to maximum stocking densities of 1,500 birds per hectare.
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