Andrew Williams

It only came to an end as a result of a court case when rationing was challenged in the High Court by a group of businesses.

Those businesses won that case.

Petrol rationing was abandoned as a result almost immediately.

And no prizes for guessing this next part, people started hoarding it again.

It did.

Robert Menzies, who went on to become our longest-serving Prime Minister, ran on a platform in part of abolishing fuel rationing, and he eventually did so officially in February 1950.

Although, as we mentioned, we were under a lot of pressure from the UK at the time, and they weren't very happy about that decision.

Which triggered the second major oil crisis of that decade.

The first was in 1973, which came as a result of the Yom Kippur War, and then the second came along in 1979.

They were essentially very similar events to what we are experiencing now.

a war in the Middle East that leads to massive disruptions in fuel supplies.

That causes trouble for countries that rely on those imports, like New Zealand and like Australia.

But Australia wasn't actually that hard hit by the Iranian revolution directly, in terms of the oil supply at least.

It coped okay, but at the same time there was a strike by workers everywhere

at a Caltex oil refinery in New South Wales.

And that added to the supply chaos.

And the combination of those two events at the same time led to a fuel rationing initiative in Australia.

But Australia was in a vastly different position then to what we are now.

We weren't as drastically reliant on fuel imports from other countries like now.

So at the moment, we rely on other countries for 90% of our fuel supplies, mainly Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia.