Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a Squiz Podcast. We're your shortcut to being informed. 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.
And I'm Andrew Williams.
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.
Chapter 2: What prompted the Albanese Government's fuel-saving campaign?
Yep, we're talking about the late 1930s and early 1940s here. But the problems actually go back even further than that to the early 1930s. The whole motoring industry was still very much in development At this point, cars and planes had only been around a couple of decades.
And in the 30s, there was a movement to think about keeping some long-term reserves of petrol in place in case of a big global disaster like World War I, but it never happened. And that became a real problem when World War II began in 1939.
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.
Yeah, but it was facing a much longer crisis to deal with. World War II, of course, went for six years and Australia had nothing like enough petrol to last it that long. So it was up to a body called the Commonwealth Oil Board to figure out what to do once war seemed like it was imminent.
And as luck may have it, it was in the middle of a meeting where that plan was being presented to the road authorities in each state when war was officially declared. That was the 3rd of September 1939.
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.
Yeah, so not exactly the same situation, but a few parallels with our current situation there. Obviously, you know, an ad campaign coming out from the government as we record this. Lots of people hoarding petrol, although they were doing that well in advance.
So the next plan was to encourage motorists to use something called a gas producer, which were these sort of big, ugly charcoal burner things that were used as a substitute for petrol. The problem is there wasn't a lot of consumer confidence in them. They were pretty cumbersome and rarely used products. technology at the time, so it didn't quite work in getting people to adopt it.
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Chapter 3: What historical events led to fuel rationing in Australia?
and it was deeply, deeply unpopular with the Australian public. 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.
Yeah, there was a huge run on petrol and that meant it became much more tricky to find, which caused chaos in industries that no longer had access to the petrol that they needed. Shortly after that time, there was a federal election and the incumbent Labor government lost.
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.
So over the coming decades, Australia pivoted to building its relationship with the US, a relationship that still exists to this day, although it's been rockier since Donald Trump came in. And of course, the US and Israel's military operation in Iran leading to the oil crisis that we're seeing now.
So after the break, we're going to go back to the last time Iran was a major player in a fuel rationing discussion in Australia. That was 1979. A message now from the Mindaroo Foundation.
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Chapter 4: How did World War II impact petrol reserves and usage in Australia?
We've been exploring the push for safe AI in Australia, the risks, opportunities and why balanced regulation matters. Stay listening at the end of the podcast when Andrew talks with Ed Santo from the Human Technology Institute at UTS, a research centre that works with government and industry to ensure AI is developed and used responsibly.
They talk about who's responsible when AI systems cause harm. As Ed puts it, if a parent lets their six-year-old behind the wheel and something goes wrong, responsibility doesn't sit with the child, it sits with the adult who allowed it. You can find out more about the Human Technology Institute at uts.edu.au or listen to their chat at the end of today's podcast.
We've spoken about this before, Andrew, back in our shortcut on Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death, but 1979 was a major year in world history, was the year of the Iranian revolution.
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.
The reason the Iranian revolution caused such a disruption is that many of the protesters in that event were workers in the oil sector, and that led to a downturn in production, which disrupted the international supply.
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.
Yeah, and it worked a lot better that time. The rule was that drivers with odd numbered license plates would alternate days with drivers with even numbered license plates in terms of when they could fill up. There were no long term supply issues and the fuel rationing lasted only weeks, not years.
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.
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Chapter 5: What were the challenges faced during the fuel rationing of the 1940s?
As a recommendation this week, I'm going to point you to an episode of the ABC's If You're Listening. It gets right into the background of what happened the last time we ran out of oil.
And we'll also link to that piece we mentioned from the Australian War Memorial. It's a really expansive piece about the history of fuel rationing during World War II and well worth a read if this is a topic that interests you.
I'll put links to both of those in the episode notes. Thanks for listening and remember to share this episode with your mates who want to hear the backstory to the big news stories. And don't forget, if you have an idea for a future Squeeze shortcut, we love to hear them. We love to hear from you. Just flick it through to hello at thesqueeze.com.au. Until next time.
Hi, I'm Andrew Williams. Ed Santo is from the Human Technology Institute at UTS, a research body that works with government and industry on the responsible development and use of AI, artificial intelligence. Ed is also a former human rights commissioner, and he brings a strong focus to how technology impacts people and society.
Ed and the Institute have helped develop Australia's voluntary AI safety standard, and they're focused on what comes next to keep Aussies safe. And Ed joins me now. Hi, Ed, how are you going? Yeah, really good. Good. Now, you've said previously that around 80% of AI harms could be addressed using the laws that we've already got.
What does that look like in practice and where are the gaps at the moment?
You know, a few years ago, Father Frank Brennan made this really profound observation, which was that a law that isn't enforced isn't a law at all. It's just a good idea. And over the last decade or so, we've kind of ignored that really important truth because we've said, oh, we can see the harms associated with AI, so we just need to create an ever-increasing amount of new laws.
And sure, we do need some reform, but actually the vast majority of our laws are... Technology neutral, which means they apply to all technologies and none. So we just need to apply them. That's really important. So for me as a human rights lawyer, you know, if I saw a kind of a bank manager who just said, you know what, I think women make bad customers. I'm not going to give loans to women.
I would have been all over that guy. But actually, the way in which banks make home loans now is using AI. And we know that very problem is happening now. So the algorithm makes it harder for women to get a loan in 2026 than it was the case 25 years ago. Right.
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