• If legislation is pursued, it should be applied generally to business, not just banking, and the following changes should be made:

o      remove the "private price disclosure" provision, so that both private and public disclosures are subject to the anti-competitive purpose test (ie "substantial lessening of competition")

o      limit the price disclosure provision to information related to future prices, not historical prices, and not prices which are already in the public domain

o      remove provisions on disclosure of supply/acquisition capacity or commercial strategy.

• If the legislation is applied on a sector by sector basis, clear criteria and consultative processes should be established and applied before regulation is applied more widely. The Government has undertaken to regulate only "after further review and detailed consideration" and "where there is strong evidence" that anti-competitive behaviours exist.
• While the ACCC has not made any public case for regulation of petrol retailing and Caltex does not believe such a case can be made.
• Caltex rejects the assertion that retailers engage in "price signalling" through Informed Sources Pty Ltd.  The purpose of the disclosure of information to Informed Sources is to enable public price information to be efficiently collated so that Caltex is better able to remain competitive on price including the provision of further discounts.
• In Caltex's view, petrol price cycles are indicative of strong competition and motorists benefit.  Price cycles enable more price-sensitive motorists to purchase petrol at heavily discounted prices by observation of past price cycles, which provides a good guide to when price cycles are likely to occur in the future.       
• If petrol retailing (or the oil industry generally) were regulated, there would be a number of impacts:

o      the disclosure of pricing information to Informed Sources would be prohibited even though the information does not relate to future prices and is publicly available, for example on price boards

o      there is some risk the changes could eliminate or modify the price discount cycle to the detriment of consumers, which would deprive many motorists of the opportunity of buying petrol at a deep discount and could increase the average price level by reducing competition

o      if retailers had to use manual observation of price boards to collect competitive price information, the industry-wide cost to consumers could be of the order of $40 million per year.

• Regulation would have serious impacts on commercial arrangements that are not anti-competitive and have a legitimate business purpose:

o      provision of pricing information by franchisees to Caltex (a retail competitor and fuel wholesale) to enable provision of rebates on the wholesale price would be prohibited

o      provision of competitor price information by Caltex commission agents to Caltex central pricing managers would be prohibited if the   commission agent was also an independent operator at another competing site or was considered a "potential competitor"

o      Caltex offers a range of fuel cards such as "StarCard" - transmission to Caltex of the card sale and the transaction sale price risks contravening the private price disclosure provisions.

• There would be impacts on public pricing information:

o      MotorMouth (part of the Informed Sources group), which provides information online to the public on fuel prices might not be viable if fuel retailers ceased providing electronic data to Informed Sources, because the cost of independent data collection would be too high

o      myPriceboard allows fuel retailers to upload data on board prices to post on MotorMouth  myPriceboard would not be viable without MotorMouth as a means of posting information.

o      Information on historical prices is provided to the Australian Institute of Petroleum (AIP) and its consultants for public reporting purposes.  AIP members would not share historical price information if there was a risk that the information would be passed on privately to competitors.