CHAIR—This is the final scheduled hearing of the inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Economics into petrol pricing in Australia. I welcome to the table, again, Mr Samuel, the Chairman, and officers of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Mr Samuel and the officers gave evidence on the first day of the hearing and have provided an extensive submission to the committee. We have asked them to return on the last day of the hearing so that senators might put to Mr Samuel or the officers any matters arising out of the other evidence which we have heard from industry players, government bodies, economists and other witnesses from whom we have heard. In those circumstances, Mr Samuel, I do not think we will have you make an opening statement unless you particularly want to.

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Mr Samuel—No, go straight to questions.

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CHAIR—We will go straight to questions. By the way, although this is set down for three hours, I would be most surprised if we are not in a position to release you much earlier than that. I will put to you some evidence which was given about the ACCC and invite you to respond to it. At the committee’s hearing in Kybong, Mr O’Keefe, the spokesman for Matilda Fuels, was asked questions by Senator Joyce and me in an exchange recorded on page 14 of the Hansard:

Senator JOYCE—Therefore it is good that independents are in the market. How can we better protect the role of independents in the fuel market?

Mr O’Keeffe—I think the ACCC should be charged with a surveillance role—not necessarily going back to where they would set maximum endorsed wholesale prices. I do believe that their knowledge of what goes on in the market since 1998 has diminished considerably.

CHAIR—That is not what they say, by the way, and it is not what Mr Cassidy told us.

Mr O’Keeffe—I know that. We used to get a lot of information. When we needed to check things we could always go to the ACCC. We found that, soon after the change in regime down there—

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and that might be a reference to you, Mr Samuel—

and the change in deregulation, they were very loath to provide information to us.

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At the hearing in Canberra, Senator Stephens raised the same subject with Mr Evans, the representative of the NRMA, which is recorded at page 23 of the transcript:

Senator Stephens—What do you think about the ACCC’s petrol price cycle webpage in terms of the extent to which it injects transparency into the market?

Mr Evans—I do not want to be impolite, but not a great deal. We do not think it gives good information. Motorists want information about the price of fuel and also why it varies to the extent that it does. That is what they pursue us about. That is why we have set up our Petrol Watch, which receives millions of hits. We believe it has had some effect on price as well. Certainly, the stations which have the lowest prices are pretty consistent. They are the market leaders. You can almost guarantee when you go on FuelWatch to find that the cheapest petrol price will be amongst a handful of stations. They are very anxious to make sure that they always have the lowest price. It has not had that effect yet in the eastern or northern suburbs, but certainly that is the thing that motorists want. When we question our members about looking at the ACCC site, they say they do not find it informative at all.

That is the end of the answer. Both of those questions essentially raise issues of the effectiveness of the ACCC’s monitoring and provision of information. Can I invite you, Mr Samuel, Mr Cassidy and other officers, if that is appropriate, to address the issues raised in those answers?

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Mr Samuel—Yes. The significant change in the level of our monitoring and in the level of information disseminated to industry players and to the marketplace occurred in 1998, with the deregulation that occurred at that point of time. We discussed at our previous appearance before this committee the difference between the price monitoring regime that was in place then and what has occurred since. Prior to 1998, there was a fair degree of communication between the ACCC and industry players. That was as a result of the information we collected pursuant to the price monitoring regime, particularly under the Prices Surveillance Act 1983 and then its substitution, which occurred as a result of the amendments made in 1996. Petrol prices were deregulated on 1 August 1998. Since then, there has been a progressive increase in the information that has been made available by the ACCC, starting from a new base, and that is a lower base of information which resulted from deregulation. Following deregulation, the level of information of course diminished because the level of information that was available to us diminished.

Towards the end of 2002 and in particular in 2003, we did establish the petrol price cycle website, which indicates to motorists the price cycles in the five major capital cities and gives an indication of the best times to buy petrol, at the trough of the cycles, and then the times when perhaps it is less advisable to buy, at the peak of the cycles. That has continued through 2003 until the present time. I did note that, in the evidence Mr O’Keefe gave when he talked of change of regime, he did tend to suggest that there was a change and a diminution of information when I took over the chairmanship of the ACCC from that which existed under Professor Fels. In fact, I think Mr O’Keefe is confused. He is probably confusing it with the deregulation period, which occurred long before in 1998.

Certainly since 2003, both under the chairmanship of Professor Fels and more recently under my chairmanship, the level of information that has been made available to motorists has gradually increased. The first thing is that we provide on our website the price cycles. The second is that we took the opportunity, particularly during the high prices that were prevalent following hurricane Katrina last year, to provide a significant increase in information to motorists in an endeavour to inform motorists why petrol prices moved through the weekly price cycles and the underlying factors governing petrol pricing in Australia.

We produced a number of documents. I will table these for the information of the committee. The first was a quite detailed booklet entitled Understanding Petrol Pricing in Australia—answers to some frequently asked questions. In many respects, the information that is contained there might provide a lot of the answers that this committee might need to a number of the questions it is addressing as part of this inquiry. At the same time, we arranged to have distributed to petrol stations around Australia a brochure entitled Understanding Petrol Pricing in Australia—answers to some frequently asked questions. The brochure was a summary of the booklet and I will give you copies of those. Several thousand of those brochures were distributed to petrol stations, with the request made to those petrol stations that they actually put them on their counters and hand them to motorists who were concerned and wanted to understand what petrol pricing was about. A large number were distributed—every service station had several hundred. I cannot guarantee they were put on top of the desks, nor can I guarantee that they were actually handed to motorists; but they were certainly distributed.

At the same time, in an endeavour to draw people’s attention to those brochures, we had prearranged with the MTAA for this poster, Understanding Petrol Pricing in Au