Alice Dempster

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The Albanese government has just launched a new media campaign encouraging Australians to use less fuel.

It comes as the war in the Middle East continues to pressure global oil supplies and it's part of an attempt to avoid fuel rationing, something we haven't had to do since the 1970s.

So in this quiz shortcut, we'll take a look at what we've done in the past with fuel rationing, what it would take to get to that stage again and how it might work.

Square Shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories.

I'm Alice Dempster.

Andrew, if Australia does end up rationing fuel this year, it will be the first time since 1979.

That's a period of history that also involved Iran.

But we're going to go back a step further to the time that we had rationing before that.

It was during the Second World War.

Yeah, although funnily enough, the country actually had more reserves than it has now, three months worth, as opposed to the 30 to 40 days that Australia currently has.

And of course, petrol use was a lot less widespread then than it is compared to now.

The Australian War Memorial website has a piece on this and see if this rings any bells for you.

It says there was a proposal that consumers should be swamped with propaganda designed to promote voluntary economy in the use of petrol in the hope that they would respond with such enthusiasm that rationing would not be necessary.

And then it goes on to say what actually happened was that as soon as rationing was mentioned, massive hoarding took place.

But actually working out a system for making it happen was almost as difficult as getting people on board.

We don't have the time to explain the bureaucracy that went into that, but it was extremely difficult.

There were delays, buying sprees before it actually came into practice and stacks of complaints.