Queensland’s Labor government turned heads last week with a bold new election promise. If returned to power, it would set up 12 state-owned petrol stations and limit fuel price rises to just five cents a litre on any given day.
The proposal certainly tapped into a pain point for Queenslanders – Brisbane topped national petrol price rankings last year.
But it was quickly met with a predictable pile on from opposing political commentators, industry bodies and some economists, attracting labels like “risky” and “dumb and stupid”.
Mark McKenzie, chief executive of the Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association, called it a “wildly bizarre intervention” in the retail fuel market.
So is the Queensland premier really out of his mind, trying to win votes less than three months out from an election? Or is there actually some merit to this proposal?
in the us the stations make almost nothing off of gas sales. the gas is there to bring people in to buy convenience items while they are at it. its the refiners and oil prices along with taxes that effect the price and the government has some control due to the strategic oil and gas reserves. Are petrol stations themselves inflating the price??? Do they not have competition?
Are petrol stations themselves inflating the price??? Do they not have competition?
Yes, they do. If you’re not Australian, you might not be familiar with the petrol price cycle that we experience. It’s a completely artificial thing driven by profit-seeking behaviour. In Perth it’s an extremely regular weekly cycle. In other capital cities it varies between under 20 and over 60 days from one peak to the next peak.
How exactly it started is a mystery, but the cycles themselves are self-reinforcing, once underway. Petrol stations in a city might start out equally-priced, but then one decreases the price slightly to give themselves a competitive advantage. Others then drop theirs to match, until someone else then drops it further. This repeats over and over, little by little, until it reaches a point that’s so low someone says “nah we’re done” and skyrockets the price way back up to the top, expecting (correctly) that everyone else will follow. And the cycle begins again. It has nothing to do with the actual global market for oil or any other costs of providing service or change in demand.
It’s basically a legal form of collusion. Because they don’t have to communicate through words, just by price signals.
This article is primarily about a plan to create a state-owned servo, which could help break the cycle by providing one much more stably-priced servo that they could just decide would not follow the cycle. But additionally, they also have a plan to cap the daily price increase, which could break the cycle by stopping the part where they skyrocket up to the top. If they wanted to keep the cycle going, they’d have to gradually go up the same as they gradually go down. Which might decrease the profitability of the cycle.
But more often than not, Australia’s citizens found themselves little better off if at all. This turned out to be a common international experience for other countries privatising their utilities.
Name one thing that’s been privatised that has resulted in any combination of better product, better service, or better price?
Hospitals.
Better service for very rich ppl. No service or unaffordable for rest.
Better product, and better service. Not better on the price, but it was asked for one out of three.
Your comment couldn’t have been clearer, but 3 out of the 4 replies to it seem to have interpreted it to mean exactly the opposite of what it says.
Either that, or those three comments are incredibly fucking dumb and their idea of “better product” is “more money for corporations”.
have you seen how much cheaper 1kg on a falcon 9 is compared to the sls
Yes, your comment was the one out of four that wasn’t stupid.
my bad i only saw 3
Ah yeah, your instance is defederated from Beehaw, which is where one of the three errors came from. (They said “water/sewer systems”.)
oh right, I forgot beehaw defederated from world and shit because of mass signups
that was so long ago, do you know how beehaw is doing?
I couldn’t tell you how they’re doing with much confidence, but their communities all seem pretty good to me.
Commonwealth Bank:
- Shitty interest rates
- account fees
Telstra:
- Patchy coverage
- Poor uptime after natural disasters
Wait nevermind
Telecom wasn’t exactly a shining example of a government run service though.
Side note: Bring back the CES , privatised job search is an absolute fucking disaster.
anything that benefits from/has potential for innovation really (things like launch vehicles), but public services and fully optimised industries whose only method of “improving efficiency” is enshittification should be owned by the people
Water/sewer systems
rapid transit. chicagos el system the various lines were all independently owned but now they are part of one system with free transfers between them and even bus and train.
A Labor pollie not pushing NeoLiberalism?
Is some of the damage that shitcunt Hawke introduced to our shores finally being undone.
I can’t see what the harm is. There couldn’t be any objection to more competition?
I’m in Sydney, but the petrol shenanigans are atrociously obvious.
I shit you not, there’s one BP station I go to that at the peak of a cycle can be 40c/l cheaper than every other BP station in the area. You know why? Because 200m down the road is an independent station that doesn’t seem to follow the price cycle.
How is it that all BPs other stations in the area are 40c/l higher, and just this one BP up the road from the independent can afford to set it’s price 40c/l lower?
The pattern becomes very obvious to spot.
