Australia's Fuel Security: A Near Miss, Not a Victory

On 20 June Energy Minister Bowen gave his weekly fuel-stock update and added a little political flourish "Now, there were those who said rationing and shortages were inevitable. The opposition said shortages were inevitable and played politics. One Nation called for rationing, demanded rationing. There were experts in the newspaper saying rationing would be inevitable." In other words, those who had warned, during the worst of the Strait of Hormuz crisis, that Australia faced rationing and shortages were merely playing politics.

Two things the Minister stated in his update are true and worth saying plainly. Our reported fuel stocks did rise to their highest levels in years. And the government did not invoke the formal rationing powers of the Liquid Fuel Emergency Act.

Credit where it is due: that is a better outcome than many of us feared in March.

The government is right that it avoided formal national rationing. But it is wrong to imply that warnings about constrained access were baseless or merely political. Rationing is not a single switch a government flicks. It is a spectrum. At one end is the formal, statutory kind, where the state dictates how much you may buy. At the other is price: when fuel becomes expensive enough, demand is rationed by the wallet rather than the rulebook. In between sit two further tiers, governments asking the public to consume less, and retailers limiting what any one customer can take.

In March and April, Australia experienced the first three of those tiers. Petrol hit a national record of around $2.38 a litre, and the government cut the fuel excise precisely to relieve the "financial stress" that price was causing households. It also launched a multi-million-dollar campaign urging Australians to drive less. And at the petrol stations the controls were concrete: some regional service stations capped purchases for each customer, while on one day in late March more than 100 stations ran dry in Victoria and 165 were without diesel in New South Wales.

That is rationing by price, by persuasion and by the pump. It seems to have worked; the Government's Fuel Statistics website notes this month that "Industry reports demand for fuel is generally lower than normal."

The only tier we avoided was the fourth. Not all the people who warned it was coming were "playing politics"; they were describing, in milder and more localised form, what eventually occurred.

The fair criticism of those warnings is one of degree, not direction. A catastrophic supply cliff did not arrive. Reserve measures, diplomacy with our trading partners and falling global prices all helped, and prices have since come down sharply. None of that is in dispute, and those who did that work deserve acknowledgement.

But "it was less bad than the worst case" is the opposite of "it didn't happen." And here the framing becomes not just inaccurate but corrosive. When you recast a near-miss as proof the risk was never real, you discredit the very people urging preparedness, and you tell a complacent nation exactly what it wants to hear: relax, the system held.

We import over 90 per cent of our transport fuels, whether as refined fuel or oil for processing in our last two refineries. We have been non-compliant with our 90-day IEA member country reserve obligation since 2012. The sovereign share of our supply, Australian crude, refined in Australia, is just a few per cent … that is not a characteristic of an energy resilient nation.