As imported petrol prices cripple our transport and tourism industries, farmers and families, the Federal Member for Kennedy has today taken the Treasurer to task for decades of Liberal and Labor government failures to secure our domestic fuel supplies with 100 per cent Australian-made, renewable ethanol.
Just one week after the Prime Minister agreed to take Kennedy MP Bob Katter’s repeated calls for a fuel ethanol mandate to his Energy Minister, Mr Katter today asked the Treasurer whether the government’s Budget would “continue to say ‘no’ to ethanol for another 30 years”.
“Since 2005, we’ve repeatedly moved that 32 per cent of our fuel requirements be met from our own oil reserves – and that’s without even tapping oil shales,” said Mr Katter in Question Time.
“Since our question to the Prime Minister last week, truckies and tourism operators, farmers and families are now paying – at best – over 25 cents a litre more at the bowser (while) one-tenth of our entire export earnings ($62,000 million) boomerangs offshore to buy fuel.”
Mr Katter said North Queenslanders from across the 567,000 square kilometre electorate of Kennedy and beyond had contacted him in droves in the past week after being unable to buy any fuel at all for essential road transport, time-critical harvests, or school bus runs in remote areas.
“I’m now told they’ve shut the pump at Babinda after the wholesale price spiked to $3 a litre, which impossible for our independent outlets to absorb or pass on to consumers, and cuts off the lifeblood of regional Queensland.”
And while the Treasurer told Parliament supply chain pressures “particularly in regional areas” were being directly addressed by the government, Mr Katter said reports of prices reaching $3.50 a litre in Sydney did not auger well for North Queensland farmers already being told they can’t be sure when to expect fuel deliveries next, or what the price for orders already placed will even be.
Dismissing the increased monitoring of petrol price-gouging and financial penalties by the ACCC as “empty threats by a toothless tiger”, Mr Katter said Australia remained “at the mercy of the Middle East” despite being “uniquely placed for self-sufficiency” with ample grain and sugar ethanol feedstocks.
“If the people running our country can’t see the bullet that’s coming for them, then get out of the way and let someone in who can.”
Meanwhile Sky News supports Katter’s claim the ACCC cannot or will not do anything about price gouging:
Australia is in a fuel security crisis and the government’s response is to write a letter.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wrote to the ACCC last week asking them to make sure fuel retailers don’t use the Middle East situation as an excuse to gouge customers. Energy Minister Chris Bowen met with oil companies and announced they’d assured him fuel would keep flowing until at least May.
Until May. We should all sleep soundly.
The ACCC has been monitoring Australian fuel prices since 2008. Eighteen years of quarterly reports, strongly worded statements and letters to fuel companies. Their advice to Australians right now during a genuine supply crisis?
Use a fuel price app to shop around for the cheapest bowser.
That’s it. That’s the plan.
Their biggest enforcement action in eighteen years was a $16 million fine against Mobil for misleading conduct at nine Queensland service stations. Mobil’s Australian revenue runs into billions annually. That fine is a rounding error on their quarterly profit statement and every one of them knows it.
Now they’ve doubled the maximum penalty to $100 million and called an emergency meeting with fuel companies to ask them to explain their pricing. The fuel companies will send their lawyers, nod politely and go home.
Meanwhile regional Australia is watching bowsers run dry and prices hit levels never seen before — and the government’s solution is a letter, a meeting and a watchdog that has spent eighteen years watching and achieving almost nothing.
Writing a letter to the ACCC about a fuel crisis is like writing a letter to a scarecrow about a fox in the henhouse.
Looks like someone’s doing something.
Doesn’t scare the fox one bit.
Cairns News is well aware that Far Northern petrol stations began price rises, in one instance 30 cents a litre over as many days when no fuel deliveries had been made at the service station.
Caltex was lifting the price on existing stocks of diesel and petrol held in their on site tanks. When queried the console operator and lessee said “…ask Caltex.”