SMH · Mike Foley · Saturday 28 March 2026
The federal government will subsidise private fuel companies to source emergency supplies globally, tacitly admitting decades of strategic petroleum reserve neglect.
Three weeks of reserves and the solution is a global scavenger hunt underwritten by the taxpayer. We spent decades privatising fuel security on the theory that the market would provide, and now we're providing the market with government money to do what a strategic reserve would have done for free. 'Ready for what may come' is a strange slogan for a country that's been told what's coming since 1973.