In 2017, I left the ABC and walked down the corridor in Parliament House to begin again as political editor for Nine News.
This was the first story I filed for Nine. At the time, my new bosses were a little bemused by it, but they humoured me.
I don’t claim credit for the insight. I was convinced by the power of an argument I had heard from a man I had come to know well, former fighter pilot and retired Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO.
In 2014, Blackburn authored a report for the NRMA warning that Australia’s fuel reserves were running on empty. This fossil fuel–rich island nation had lost the capacity to produce and refine its own fuel. We were dangerously dependent on imports. Our reserves were wafer thin.
So thin that we were in breach of our obligations to the International Energy Agency.
We counted fuel on tankers at sea as part of our stockpile.
Nearly 90 per cent of the liquid fuel that kept this nation running came from overseas.
Even then, the picture was clear. We were dangerously exposed in a world that was becoming less stable.
Now the echo from the past is all too real. Today, that vulnerability is no longer theoretical.
The Third Gulf War has choked off the oil that feeds the Asian refineries supplying this nation with diesel, petrol and jet fuel. Prices have spiked. The threat of rationing is real. Parts of regional Australia are already running on empty.
We are hostage to long and fragile supply lines in a world now gripped by an energy war. Our economy depends on more than two massive tankers arriving on our shores every single day.
If that flow is disrupted, even briefly, the consequences will be dire. Oil and gas underpin the price of everything. When they rise, everything rises.
If supply stalls, road transport stops, shelves empty, and the economy collapses. This is a crisis we were warned about.
This is what a just-in-time nation looks like when time runs out.
So the question arises: will we learn the right lessons from this crisis?
The lesson is simple.
Fuel security is national security. We need to be far more self-sufficient in the fuels that keep this country running. We need to tap our vast resources of coal, oil and gas. We need to explore the possibilities of converting coal to liquid fuel. We need to explore for oil. We need more gas.
Otherwise, the next shock will not just test our economy. It will test our sovereignty.
