Playing and losing

I heard yesterday that Fuel Watch is to be canned this week. From an layman's point of view, this is another round of political games where the populace has lost.

The prices around Melbourne were an absolute debacle last year before the fuel watch proposal was announced; there was no workable average to base your prices on, you just had to either drive past a lot of stations or take a chance depending on how many options you had. Things have settled down now to the point that generally prices are stable and, for reasons best known to the oil companies, they fluctuate the prices to make Tuesday the cheapest.

Apparently, we should all be grateful that the prices are cheaper on Tuesday, you can get 4c off a litre and fuel watch should be scrapped as it might interfere with how good the oil companies are to us. This was the basic message from the RACV spokesman speaking on the news. If you take a step back, you might wonder if the schedule from the oil companies point of view is to make it more expensive at the weekend and add 4c to the price, unless they have a receipt from one of their marketing partners.

In my own personal opinion, once the fuel watch has been scrapped for good, we can watch the prices spiraling out of any basis and the days where the petrol is 'reduced' starting to shift around. We may have just played a game with the oil companies that they were manipulating from the beginning to allow a grand-standing politician to say how we really don't need any laws to work with the petrol prices, they are self-regulating and the companies involved are a bunch of nice guys with our best interests at heart.