Originally published by James Morrow of The Daily Telegraph
09.03.2026
Australia is potentially on the brink of an energy crisis that could bring consequences cascading from the petrol pump to supermarket shelves to our hospitals and even defence.
And here’s the worst bit: we were warned more than a decade ago.
Way back in 2013, defence and national security expert John Blackburn AO warned Australia, in a paper written for the NRMA, that “we have adopted a ‘she’ll be right’ approach to fuel security.”
Blackburn correctly highlighted the risk to Australia during conflicts in the Middle East, but said Australia too often made the mistake of assuming the market would sort out supply rather than preparing for the worst‑case scenario of supply interruptions.
The consequences, he warned, could be dire.
“Unfortunately, our unwillingness to assure our liquid fuel supplies puts at risk many of the societal functions that we take for granted,” Blackburn wrote.
“Without an adequate supply of liquid fuels we could not access health services; food production and distribution would be severely curtailed; most businesses could not operate; our personal and much of the public transportation system could not function; and our Defence Forces could not operate.”
And in a warning that can only be described as chilling, he added: “Essentially, our society as we know it would cease to function.”
It’s almost as hard to believe these warnings were not heeded as it is to realise that at the start of the century, Australia was nearly self‑sufficient when it came to petrol and diesel.
Instead, even after surviving the supply shock of Covid‑19 six years ago, we stayed the course.
Today we have around 32 days’ worth of petrol, diesel and jet fuel in reserve, despite signing an international treaty that calls on us to maintain 90 days’ worth of reserves.
Oh, and to make things worse, the price of “bunker fuel”, which powers the cargo ships we rely on for just about everything, has also spiked.
To be sure, Australia has virtually no say in what’s going on in the Gulf.
We can’t do anything about potential fuel shortages that could see vital shipping dramatically curtailed.
But when it comes to the things we can control, Australia — or rather, our political class — has spent the past two decades making one bad decision after another.
Unlike the US, which finally learnt the lessons of a series of Middle East oil shocks and made itself energy independent, Australia swallowed the lies of greenies and globalists while mocking Donald Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill.”
Instead, we invested heavily in subsidising the “renewable energy transition”, invested in fairy tales like green hydrogen, all while ignoring the fact that all the solar and wind power in the world can’t power heavy trucks needed to move food and fuel around the country.
Nor can renewables make urea — produced from natural gas and essential for fertiliser — which we increasingly import, yet still rely on to grow our food.
Certainly federal Labor’s aggressive drive towards net zero, coupled with state Labor governments making it ever harder to get energy out of the ground, bears much of the blame for this potential disaster.
But neither side of politics should escape blame for this.
It was Scott Morrison who committed the Coalition and Australia to net zero in 2021 (perhaps, some have suggested, as a quid pro quo for inking the AUKUS deal with the left‑wing Biden administration).
As Nationals MP and former party leader Barnaby Joyce candidly admitted on Sunrise on Monday morning, “we did the wrong thing”.
We’d better start doing the right thing, urgently, if we want to avoid a crisis‑level energy and supply shock.
