00:02Well, Joe, essentially what it does is that the government can now, through their newly
00:05appointed fuel controller, compel suppliers and retailers of fuel to essentially reveal
00:11the breakdown of costs of that fuel.
00:14Now, that comes in a couple of different forms.
00:16There's the cost structure of selling that fuel.
00:18There's the margins derived from the sales of their fuel and clarity as to how exactly
00:22those prices were set.
00:23They've got to share all of that with the government under this act, which has just
00:27been enacted for the first time since it was introduced in 1949.
00:32Now, that's one part of this new act that's just been enacted.
00:35The other part is the fact that the government, again, through the fuel controller, can essentially
00:40intervene by setting or overriding the price of fuel in the Northern Territory.
00:46Now Treasurer Bill Yan says he hopes that the government doesn't have to do that, that it
00:49never comes to a situation that extreme.
00:51But he also made very clear earlier today that he's passed on his expectations to fuel retailers
00:57and suppliers that he wants the impacts of that halving of the fuel excise that we just
01:01heard about to take effect as soon as possible.
01:04And are there many servos there in the Northern Territory that don't have particular forms of
01:08fuel?
01:10No, not from what we've heard of.
01:12We were just speaking to the Treasurer of the Northern Territory, Bill Yan, who said that
01:15he doesn't know about any instances of that happening.
01:18He essentially says that fuel reserves across the territory are doing okay for the time being.
01:22Our reserves are at about 30 days' worth of fuel, and he attributes that to us not having
01:27missed a shipment of fuel yet, obviously those shipments coming straight in through the port
01:30of Darwin, as well as Territorians doing the right thing.
01:33I mean, it's not panic buying or not hoarding fuel.
01:35That being said, there have definitely been distribution issues within the Northern Territory,
01:40and that's primarily down to the intense natural disasters that we've been seeing, particularly
01:44across the Big Rivers region recently.
01:47Prices across the board, especially in regional parts of the Northern Territory, which is most
01:51of it, have particularly peaked recently when we're talking about diesel.
01:56Petrol prices, though higher than usual, have started to plateau a little bit, but it's
02:00still exorbitantly high.
02:02If we're looking at places like the Tiwi Islands, just north of Darwin, prices of petrol and diesel
02:06are up around that 337 mark.
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