June 8 2009
Ashley Robinson

The middle of last week Anna Bligh coughed the swine flu off the front page when she announced her government’s plan to snatch the 8 cents per litre fuel subsidy we have enjoyed for many years in the Sunshine state.

Health on the back burner because this new petroldemic was going to hit us in the pocket from July 1. Unlike swine flu, there was no guess work on whether as an individual we were going to catch it.

Here was an actual date for another disaster.

Anna’s timing was interesting, the day before Origin one. She stated one of the reasons for taking it away was because southerners have abused the system when visiting the great state of QLD. Talk about motivation. The Maroon forwards looked like they were really ticked off with the Blues taking our 8 cents per litre. Well done Anna.

It seems to me the state and federal mobs have worked a beautiful ruse- the big boys giving out tax cuts and stimulus handouts while Anna relieves us of it via higher petrol which experts say will be about $350 year to the average motorist. And there’s more. Not steak knives, but transport companies will pass on their extra costs on food, beer and anything else that gets carted, taxis will put their prices up and so will public transport. Probably the rest of Kev’s handout will be sucked up that way.

At the end of the day, it may all break even. That’s of course if you received Kev’s handout in the first place. If you didn’t, well, it is the price we pay for the recession we had to have. Of course that argument is flawed because going on the latest figure, we aren’t in a recession anyway, it is a bit like who’s on first and what’s’ on second.

I must say I am totally confused which is probably exactly where the politicians want me to be. Let me play the game for awhile though, if there is a recession and reality shows that the state deficit is that big that any self respecting recession would be proud to have it, then should the fuel subsidy go.

In my opinion the answer is yes, Anna has made the right call. After you pick yourself up off the floor I will explain my reasoning. We probably aren’t getting it anyway. The oil companies have been rorting us for years. Sure no-one has managed to prove it but how hard have they tried? At least this way we are doing something positive towards the huge debt we are in.

The sad part of these types of rorts and peoples perception is simply explained with the case of the late Visy tycoon Richard Pratt who sadly died with a cloud over his character for price fixing with a competitor. The only reason people had an opinion in that case is because he was a person. They could put a face to the rort and some of the public were horrified that he may have been fixing prices with a competitor. Shock, horror!

What do people think’s been going on since Moses was a boy? Oil companies, breweries, airlines, to name a few, seem to have had parallel pricing. Is it a coincidence? I think not. But they are faceless entities that seem to be able to get away with it and we as a nation seem to have turned a blind eye. As they say, it is only a rort if you aren’t in it. My thinking is, the right people must be in it.

Maybe instead of pandemic or petroldemic the new buzz word should be scamdemic, that way the media would have something to write about for eternity.