Government propose national fuel-watch program
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008The federal Government announced its decision to extend the WA scheme nationally, and the only saving grace is that it won’t be introduced until year’s end because, frankly, the scheme is a nonsense with only political benefits.
The Government wants to be seen as doing something about petrol prices, so it unveiled a petrol price commissioner for the ACCC, which is also an anathema, given the ACCC is meant to look after economy-wide benefits, and now the fuel-watch program, which actually stops retailers dropping prices.
The idea of the scheme is retail prices are posted on the internet and not allowed to be touched for 24 hours.
This means that if a retailer finds out the guy next door has lower prices, he can’t change them, and as 70 per cent of a service station’s gross profits are from the convenience store, this can be a disaster.
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