As an occasional car user (thank you to my very generous housemate), nothing prepared me for the moment I filled up their tank this week and realised a full tank was about a third of my weekly rent. That shock to the system, plus stories about people stockpiling, events quietly being cancelled because no one can afford to get there, and fresh fears about supply chains, made me want to figure out what governments can actually do about this fuel mess and why they seem so hesitant to do it.
To unpack everything, we spoke with Melbourne University transport academic John Stone and looked at what politicians, farmers and global energy experts are saying about the crisis.
How serious is this fuel crunch?
From a transport perspective, Stone says the pain at the bowser is landing on top of everything else going up. “It’s very serious because of the cost-of-living crisis and combined with the fact that for so many of us, a car is essential for actually participating in the life of the city,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV. For many people, especially in outer suburbs and regional areas, there simply isn’t a real alternative to driving for work, groceries, health care or getting kids to school.
Pressed in parliament, energy minister Chris Bowen also gave a clear breakdown of how widespread the shortages are yesterday. He said that in New South Wales, 37 out of 2,444 service stations currently have no fuel, while in Queensland 47 outlets have no diesel and 32 have no regular unleaded, out of just over 1,800 stations. In Victoria, he said 109 outlets recently had one or more fuel grades unavailable. Bowen confirmed that six out of 81 expected fuel shipments since the Middle East war began have been cancelled or deferred, but that several of those have already been replaced with new supply.
Stone argues this isn’t just bad timing, it’s the result of how Australia has built its cities. “For many people it’s a decision that’s been made for us by the way we’ve built our cities over the last 50 or 60 years,” he says, pointing to decades of road‑heavy planning that have locked people into car dependence.
Is working from home actually a solution?
One of the big ideas floated by the government is working from home more often to cut fuel use. Bowen has called that “a sensible thing to do in any environment”, saying work from home “has become an important part of Australian working life”, after the International Energy Agency suggested countries use it to ease oil price pressures. Social services minister Tanya Plibersek backed that up, saying “if you can reduce your fuel use, then that would be a really helpful thing to do”, but stressed “we’re not telling people that they must work from home” and that “the most helpful thing people could do is just buy the fuel they need and no more”.
Stone agrees remote work can play a role, but says it’s not a magic fix. “I think it can and… it’s going to be big enough to be useful to consider,” he says, while warning that “isolation isn’t the answer”, given what we learned during COVID about the downsides of enforced working from home.
New South Wales premier Chris Minns has also pushed back on a blanket work‑from‑home order for the public service, arguing 85 per cent of state public servants “work at the coalface” as nurses, paramedics, police and firefighters, so sending them home “wouldn’t make much of a difference” to fuel demand.
Would free or cheaper public transport help?
While city office workers are being nudged towards PT, regional communities are dealing with empty bowsers. In parts of rural Victoria, petrol stations have run completely dry, leaving farmers scrambling for diesel to operate machinery. Victorian Farmers Federation president Brett Hosking has called on the state government to make public transport free in Melbourne so commuters stay off the roads and fuel can be redirected to regional areas.
“We need to get the fuel out of our metropolitan areas and into those rural communities, where it’s needed to grow your food and fibre,” Hosking told Today. He warned that “Australian farms run on liquid fuel” and argued that “if just one in five Victorian car commuters shifted to public transport, the fuel saved would be enough to plant roughly half of Australia’s wheat, barley, canola and lentil crop”.
Stone sees cheaper or free fares as a useful nudge, particularly if they’re targeted at shorter urban trips. He notes that in Melbourne “we have a very odd fare system where it’s the same price to travel on the train to Mildura as it is to go to the next suburb on the bus”, and suggests making local trips cheaper could help some people “live with this crisis”.
But he stresses that price is only part of the problem. “For most people public transport may be there, there might be a bus stop, but the bus doesn’t allow them to do the things they need to do,” he says. If services are slow, infrequent or don’t run late or on Sundays, they can’t really replace the car — even when the fare is low or zero.
What could governments change in the short term?
Federally, the government has released fuel from reserves and temporarily relaxed some standards to get more supply into the market, while insisting Australia still has more than a month’s worth of petrol and diesel stored. That might stabilise the system overall, but it doesn’t necessarily help if your local servo is out.
On the transport side, Stone says there are practical levers governments can pull quickly to help people use less fuel. He argues price changes are one obvious step.
“The first thing that you could do is change what people get charged and do that immediately”, through things like targeted public transport fare cuts or toll discounts for cars with multiple passengers, he told P.TV.
He also points to behavioural measures that could be pushed hard right now, such as encouraging carpooling, making it cheaper to share cars on toll roads, and helping people plan multi‑purpose trips instead of driving back and forth for single errands. Combined with voluntary work‑from‑home where it makes sense, Stone says “those things could be happening… next month”.
What about bigger changes like rationing or fixing the system?
Some of the more dramatic ideas people are throwing around, like fuel rationing or limiting which cars can be on the road on certain days, have been used overseas in past fuel and pollution crises. Stone notes that “in other times when there’s been real peaks in fuel availability… there’s number plates things where you can drive one day and not the next day”, but those measures bring major disruption to everyday life.
Other countries are already reaching for harder levers. In Sri Lanka, the government has declared every Wednesday a public holiday for public institutions as part of emergency measures to conserve fuel, effectively moving to a four‑day work week. Schools and universities are included, while essential services like healthcare stay open, and authorities have reinstated fuel rationing through a National Fuel Pass system that limits purchases to 15 litres for private cars and five litres for motorcycles. Officials have framed it as preparing for the worst while hoping for the best as the conflict in the Middle East disrupts oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz.
So why the hesitation in Australia? Stone thinks politics is a big part of it. He says governments “want to be seen as allowing people to do what they want to do” and to project a sense that “everything’s going to be fine”, pointing out that leaders have been keen to say there’s “no need for rationing” because of reserves. In his view, “it’s important that people say yeah, ‘this is a crisis and we need to figure out what we do together’. And pretending it isn’t happening isn’t going to work”.
Looking to the future
Beyond the immediate shock, Stone thinks this crisis should change how we think about fossil fuel use altogether. “Basically we have to come to think of using fossil fuels as in some ways a luxury,” he told P.TV.
That means asking “what travel can we avoid?” and supporting people to drive less through car sharing, combining trips and choosing other modes where possible.
He points out that many of the behaviours people are now considering out of financial necessity are the same ones climate experts have been urging for years: planning trips more carefully, using active transport or bikes where that’s realistic, and shifting to public and shared transport when it works. For him, “at one level it’s whatever it takes” — if a price shock like this is what finally pushes governments and communities to reduce fossil fuel consumption and invest properly in alternatives, “then, well, that’s good for the planet. The planet desperately needs it, so let’s do it”.
None of these factors makes it less brutal to watch the numbers climb at the bowser this week. But it does make the choice in front of governments clearer: keep relying on gentle nudges and hope global markets calm down, or start using this crisis to build a system where filling up the tank isn’t the thing that breaks your budget.
In the mean time, if you are forced to fill up your car more often than you’d like, you can find some petrol hacks HERE that might save you some precious moola.
Lead image: Getty
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