Michael Janda

So these are pretty critical talks, as well as shipping refined product to us.

Whether we'll get a written ironclad guarantee, you know, they're in a pretty strong bargaining position.

There'd be a lot of other countries scouring the world to find where they can get fuel supplies, and indeed Australia's been doing that ourselves, where we're bringing in fuel from the Gulf of Mexico, from as far afield as the North Sea, places we'd never normally go,

because of the transport costs, but everything becomes much more economic now that fuel prices are so high.

It does.

And it would be a massive departure from Australia to do that because the government does not intervene in our commodity exports directly.

as a general rule like we've been shipping iron ore to China as a

free market trade, even if the customer is not a free market economy.

Likewise, with liquefied natural gas, those are big multinational consortiums that own those plants that process that gas and export it into Asia.

They're all on commercial contracts, mostly long-term, and it would be a massive shift in policy for the government to override those long-term contracts and force the gas suppliers to keep the gas in the ground or not send it offshore.

basically as a bargaining chip to get liquid fuels into Australia.

For context, the government hasn't even sought to impose additional taxes or domestic fuel reservations, for instance, on the East Coast, because that has been argued that that would be retrospectively interfering with commercial decisions and contracts that have been entered into already.

Even though

The domestic manufacturing industry has been screaming out for a domestic gas reservation on the East Coast for years to offset the internationally linked higher prices that they've been suffering under.

So it would be a massive step for the government to do that.

And I think that's why they've been treading very carefully about the language.

Yeah, well, they've been putting a lot of money on the table to back up these talks about bringing in extra fuel supplies and locking in additional contracts where there is availability.

I think that's quite effective, but in terms of ad campaigns to try and get people to use less fuel, well, if you wanted to do that, you shouldn't have cut the excise on fuel because any economist will tell you that price signals are as if not more effective than any advertising campaign.

Also, there's a big debate about whether they've really missed the direction of where they should have gone.

cutting the excise on petrol prices and getting consumers to do fuel saving or not working from home and using public transport, that's great.