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Dan Tehan, the shadow minister for energy, said Gallagher’s criticism of the Coalition’s fuel plan wasn’t fair.

Tehan said the call for a 50% cut to the fuel excise whenever barrels of oil top US$100 was a “good, sensible, practical measure” that would help Australians deal with a cost of living crisis. He told RN:

[What] I would say to Anthony Albanese and the Labor party is get out amongst the people and see what’s happening in your electorates because people are hurting because of cost of living …

We have the discipline to be able to do the policy work to make sure we can offset policies like this so it won’t be inflationary and it will provide much needed relief to people, and they need it now.

Obviously we’ve helped when the war started with some changes to the fuel excise but we’ve shifted, and [are] including in the budget, to providing more permanent cost of living arrangements, including through the tax system, to make sure that that ongoing cost-of-living help is there permanently, not just in these one-off arrangements, which, when we’ve got higher inflation, could be difficult in the economy.

Our decisions have been built and baked into the budget to make sure that that cost-of-living help is permanent. You know, the sooner this war in the Middle East stops, the better.