Page 92 - Conveniece World Magazine Nov/Dec 2020

ACAPMA PETROLEUM INDUSTRY REPORT FROM PAGE 89 and averaged 23 per cent during FY20. In other words, even after the government decided to strengthen the biofuels mandate, consumer purchases of E10 have continued to decline. And so, we turn to the latest development in this saga, with the government having recently completed a five-year statutory review of the legislation. This review is required by law and involves the government deciding whether the legislation should continue unchanged, be modified, or be abandoned altogether. Mindful of the fact that this legislation imposes costs on fuel retailers for a fuel product that NSW motorists don’t want, and that the operation of the legislation imposes unnecessary red tape on service station businesses, we believed it was time to give up on the mandate given the ‘bad joke’ that it has become. Yet, the most recent review has recently recommended that the legislation be continued for a further five years. The reasons for this recommendation are hard to fathom and are not addressed in the latest NSW government review report. The review found that “the regulatory framework and objectives of the act continue to be largely appropriate”. The report acknowledges that the minimum biofuels sale requirements have not been met at any time since the legislation was first introduced 13 years ago, but this doesn’t acknowledge that the total volume of E10 sales has fallen since the last review of 2015. Curiously, the report goes on to state that the reasons for the failure “are numerous, including low price differentials between several types of fuel, customer concerns about ethanol blends and, in the case of biodiesel, a lack of supply”. Any objective assessment of these issues suggests that the continued pursuit of the mandate is unrealistic in the face of constantly falling market adoption rates of biofuels, and the inability of the biofuels industry to supply biodiesel. Yet, in a somewhat bizarre conclusion, the review report concludes that these “barriers are not insurmountable, and the NSW government remains committed to the objectives of the act”. In other words, the government is committed to the pursuit of patently unrealistic biofuels targets that have been going backwards for more than a decade. The report makes eight recommendations about the future operation of the NSW biofuels legislation. Fortunately, three of these recommendations seek to reduce the regulatory compliance burden for fuel businesses. These recommendations include: JOIN ACAPMA ACAPMA IS A NATIONAL INDUSTRY BODY REPRESENTING FUEL DISTRIBUTORS AND FUEL RETAILERS IN AUSTRALIA ACAPMA Membership includes access to a range of benefits: • • • • • ADVOCACY: on behalf of the industry EMPLOYMENT & COMPLIANCE: advice, support health check audits, template documents & representation (including unfair dismissal) TRAINING: and recognition schemes focused on standardised online safety and compliance training for employees in fuel retail, transport & contractor roles EVENTS: by the industry, for the industry NEWS & INFORMATION: updated daily online and delivered to your inbox every Friday • • • Digitising the exemption application process for volume fuel retailers (Recommendation 2). Amending the act to remove the requirement for primary wholesalers to be registered with NSW Fair Trading and to report volumes of petrol sold (Recommendation 4). Reducing the frequency of reporting requirements from quarterly to every six months (Recommendation 5). A D V O C A C Y EVENTS TRAINING EMPLOYMENT I N F O R M AT I O N ACAPMA 1300 160 270 communications@acapma.com.au ACAPMA welcomes the three recommendations cited above but maintains the position that the continued pursuit of the mandated biofuels targets in NSW is wholly unrealistic and benefits no one other than the state’s monopoly biofuels producer. 90 CONVENIENCE WORLD NOV/DEC, 2020 ACAPMA 18603 HP indd 1 27/7/20 3:37 pm