The ACCC subsequently shifted the policy goalposts to arguing that saving a few cents per litre was not the objective of the policy at all. According to Graeme Samuel: ‘It is not about 1.9c or 0.7c or whatever econometric modelling might be able to show’ (Senate Estimates Hansard, 5 June 2008: E16); rather the FuelWatch scheme would empower consumers. Graeme Samuel has described FuelWatch as ‘a consumer empowerment exercise. It is designed to empower consumers to take advantage of a competitive marketplace (Ibid).

We are invited to believe that fixing prices constitutes a ‘competitive marketplace’. This is, of course, entirely counterintuitive. As Chris Bowen wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I was intrigued that the body whose charter is to promote competition in Australia was telling Australia’s first Competition Minister that a scheme to limit changes in petrol prices should now be considered to promote competition in the fuel market’ (SMH, 4 June 2008; emphasis added). Chris Bowen’s scepticism was well-placed and we know that he was convinced by the ACCC’s econometric analysis that has been critiqued above. In essence, the ACCC was trading off fixed prices against asymmetric information. The difficulty the ACCC have is that it did not say how big the asymmetric information problem is in the petrol market, nor do the ACCC provide any argument or evidence to suggest that the economic gains from reducing asymmetric information are greater than the economic costs of price fixing. Asymmetric information is a theoretical problem — in the real world markets evolve solutions to deal with that problem (albeit imperfectly). By contrast, price fixing is a real-world problem. So much so that price fixing is illegal under the Trade Practices Act. After much prompting by Senator Helen Coonan, the ACCC admitted that if petrol retailers colluded to create their own FuelWatch-type scheme whereby prices were fixed for 24 hours ‘then that is rather more likely to be a breach of the Trade Practices Act’ (Senate Estimates, 5 June 2008: E81).