Reality of Rudd sinks in

ON Sunday, I swung the family car into a BP service station on Warringah Road at Forestville to top up the tank.

At $1.38 a litre, the price was too good to pass up. Last Friday, when I drove by, the price I recall was around $1.50, today it is around $1.47. I was able to squeeze some 25 litres into the Tarago's tank, costing about $34.50. If Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's promise to cut petrol costs by reducing the excise by 5c had applied, I would have saved $1.25. That might seem like chicken feed but it runs to $60 over a year and as a member of an ordinary working family, that is $60 I would rather keep in my pocket than hand over to the Rudd Government. Of course, it is a given that Big Government, like Big Oil aren't that interested in Ordinary Working Families until they want something - your vote or your money and in the case of the Rudd Government's first Budget, it is both. When I called the particular service station to check what the price of petrol had been on Friday and what it was yesterday, I was told the proprietors could not give pricing details over the telephone and that I would have to return to look at the bowser and make a note of the price. This policy, the manager said, was dictated by Shell, and he gave me a number to call, which I did. The person there said she could not tell me what the price of petrol was anywhere as prices were set by the individual service stations, however she gave me a number to call for Shell's corporate headquarters in Melbourne, where I was told that Coles Express might know . . . and so on. That's a little off the point though. On Sunday night, I felt good because I had saved money by not buying petrol on Friday. Yesterday, I still felt good because I hadn't waited until then to fill up. However, I would have felt better if I had saved that $1.25 promised by Coalition leader Dr Brendan Nelson last week and I suspect most Australians except those dyed-in-the-wool, one-eyed, rusted-on true believers would have felt the same way. Whether the true believers actually feel they would rather pay more for petrol knowing that it was the Keating Labor government that added that 5c to petrol excise in 1993, at the same time Mr Keating was making his infamous and later-to-be-broken L-A-W promise on tax cuts, is difficult to determine but Labor's debts were a huge burden on the rest of the population before the Howard government managed not only to repay them but also endow the Rudd Government with a healthy surplus and a debt-free economy. Last year, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan promised they would act to keep the pressure on inflation and prices, a promise which is now known by the derogatory acronym PIG - petrol, inflation, groceries. It is just one of a huge list of Rudd's broken promises. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, price increases in Mr Rudd and Mr Swan's home town of Brisbane since they became Prime Minister and Treasurer respectively, have not stopped rising. An ABS list of average retail prices of selected items between December 2007 and March 2008 shows the price of butter rose 20 per cent, dry biscuits 7.4 per cent, self-raising flour 18 per cent, roast beef 9.2 per cent, lamb chops 12.7 per cent, potatoes 13.4 per cent, tomatoes 9.1 per cent, canned peaches 8.3 per cent, dishwashing detergent 9.9 per cent and unleaded petrol by 5.6 per cent. There is now a public division within the Coalition over the tactic of promising a cut in petrol excise. In essence it is between those who think Dr Nelson was correct to pitch his Budget reply speech at Australians who are feeling the pinch and suspect they have been ripped off by the Rudd Labor Government, and those like shadow treasurer Malcolm Turnbull, who wanted to stay true to free market principles and impress the electorate with their economic credentials. Liberal sources say Mr Turnbull was arguing for a 10c a litre excise cut just three or four weeks ago when this issue was before shadow cabinet. His suggestion to the strategy meeting last Tuesday night that it might be unwise to undermine the party's credentials with a populist approach to reducing the price of petrol, may have been a little late and directed more toward those within the party whom he hopes to lobby during the inevitable leadership struggle. What has been overlooked by commentators hoping to exploit a Liberal leadership wrangle is the reality that the punters want action, not reviews or summits and study groups. A week after the Budget, it is beginning to dawn on Australians that the Rudd Government has promised that about 100,000 people will lose their jobs, that competition for jobs will increase when up to 300,000 new immigrants are ushered into the country, that small businesses are going to suffer, pensioners are not going to be helped and that medical and dental care is going to worsen. As the growing disaster gains pace, a 5c per litre cut in petrol excise starts to look pretty good.