Chris Bowen

Yeah, that's right, Luke.

Thanks for having me on.

Well, we are at the end of a refined fuel supply chain here in Australia.

We have two refineries.

They're relatively small by international standards, and we have some oil extraction, but it only provides a small amount of our oil.

So we are at the end of a supply chain, and in this particular international crisis where the Straits of Hormuz have been the real flashpoint, we, like the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, you know,

uh foreign minister balakshiran of singapore has called this an asian crisis and i think he's pretty right have really been you know in the pointy end um of the impact um having said that we've had no ships that we expected to arrive failed to turn up um we have actually now more fuel in australia at the at today than on the day that iran was bombed so we've taken a number of measures um firstly public communications to tell people look

We're okay for the moment, but you know, let's all be sensible here.

Let's all not use any fuel that we don't need.

We did deal early on in the international crisis with a big spike in domestic demand, no more fuel use for a lot more fuel purchases.

So that really put pressure on our domestic supply chain.

And more latterly, we've carried legislation through the parliament to give our Export Finance Australia, our trade financing organisation, the ability to work with companies to get extra cargos into Australia to provide a bit of extra buffer because this crisis is not being solved overnight.

So as we speak, we've secured an extra 450 million litres of diesel and an extra 100 million litres of jet fuel.

That in and of itself won't be enough, but it is an addition to all the fuel that always would have arrived here anyway.

And of course, we're making these deals and announcements every few days.

The IEA standard I'm happy to talk about and our own domestic standards, we measure them differently.

So when I talk about fuel in Australia, I only talk about fuel in our economic zone.

As you know, the IEA measure can be fuel held anywhere in the world that can be sold onto the international market.

Whereas what I'm talking about is fuel that's in Australia.

That's I think the more relevant test for us as we speak in terms of our own fuel security.