The Federal Government’s petrol price inquiry, set to kick off in August, must rake the industry and oil company practices top-to-bottom to restore transparency to petrol pricing, to win the confidence of motorists and bring the market back under control, the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC) said today.

“VACC has been campaigning for years to have petrol pricing and refiner margins put under a microscope,” VACC Executive Director David Purchase said.

“At a time when the world barrel price is surging and motorists are being bled at the pump, fat-cat oil companies are recording massive profit turn-arounds. What is going on here? It is time the oil companies were called to account.”

For years, VACC has called for Government action on the lack of transparency in wholesaling pricing and refiner margins.

15 August 2000. “… we urge the Federal Government to commission an independent inquiry into the method of calculating Australian petrol prices.” 

21 August 2000. “VACC started the call for an inquiry into wholesale petrol prices and we will not give up until something is done… It is high time we had a full-blown investigation into the steep and ever-increasing rise in wholesale petrol prices and the sooner this happens, the better.”

22 June 2001. “Whatever happened to the Federal Government’s inquiry into petrol prices?”

24 April 2002. “…the public may quite rightly have serious concerns about the state of the industry and what goes on behind the veil of confusion, convoluted arrangements and artificial pricing structures propped in place by the oil companies.”

23 March 2005. “The petrol market breeds inequities, for decades the oil companies have exerted an unfair market control and VACC has been calling for an investigation of oil company practices for a long time.”

6 September 2005. “…it (the Government) needs to embark on a ‘boots and all’ examination of oil companies practices to bring some transparency to the market. No-one in this country, outside of the oil companies, call tell us what it costs to produce a litre of oil. We suspect oil company profiteering, but who would know?”

7 April 2006. “If we still had a Prices Surveillance Authority, scrapped by the Treasurer in 1999, we would most likely not be experiencing the pain at the pump we are experiencing now."