Cabinet split over Australia's FuelWatch scheme

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd faced his first crisis in six months in power, with the revelation on May 28 that his cabinet willfully ignored the unanimous advice of its four most powerful economic departments against creating a national FuelWatch price monitoring scheme. After the emergence of leaked departmental briefings to cabinet, Treasurer Wayne Swan conceded that the government had dismissed the consensus of the nation’s bureaucracy as a bit academic. He said cabinet had favored the advice of the consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, that a national price monitoring scheme would reduce fuel costs for motorists. The damaging cabinet leak to the Nine Network, understood to have enraged the Prime Minister, was the second in two days. (May 29, 2008)