New crisis. Same patterns. Same failures.

COVID, AdBlue, and now a fuel shortage. Let's look at the patterns of a country that keeps ignoring its own warnings.

We’re sitting in the middle of a familiar pattern. We’re in crisis mode - but not panic mode just yet. The pressure builds, the public gets angry, and the government reaches for the quickest fix that works well as a headline. Not the structural reform that might actually prevent the next one, but just enough to get through the news cycle. And right now, with petrol stations running dry, diesel north of three dollars, and farmers warning of fifty per cent food price increases, the government has reached for the lever marked “temporary relief”.

If I sound cynical, it’s probably because I am.

Every crisis we’ve faced this century has taught the same lesson: Australia is dangerously dependent on supply chains it does not control. And every time, the response has been just enough for now, but never enough to fix the underlying problem. This one is no different.

Right on cue, the Prime Minister has announced the Government will halve the fuel excise for three months - a cut of 26.3 cents a litre. He said Australians are under serious pressure. They are. But a temporary excise cut is a cost-of-living sugar hit that does nothing to address why we are in this position in the first place.

We are not paying more for fuel because the excise is too high. We are paying more because a war in the Middle East closed the Strait of Hormuz and Australia had no structural capacity to absorb the shock. Shaving 26 cents off the bowser price for twelve weeks while the underlying vulnerability remains untouched is a placebo, at best.

The problem

Australia imports 90 per cent of its refined fuel. We have two refineries left. We have never met the International Energy Agency’s mandatory 90-day fuel reserve. And right now, because of a war we’re not fighting, in a strait we don’t control, relying on refineries we don’t own, six hundred service stations across the country have run dry (with more being added to the list each day).

This is a pure-play sovereignty problem. And fuel is only where it starts.

The facts on the ground

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz - in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes - has done what every serious policy body in the country warned would happen. It has exposed, in real time, the structural fragility of Australia’s fuel supply.

Diesel is above three dollars a litre. Petrol has surged past $2.60 (this is since I last checked - since then, it could be well higher. If you’ve had to fill up today, feel free to comment below). Six oil shipments bound for Australia next month have been cancelled or deferred. NSW declared an energy supply emergency in mid-March, with over a hundred stations out of diesel and dozens completely dry. Farmers are warning that food prices could rise by fifty per cent. Victoria and Tasmania have waived public transport fares to take pressure off fuel demand.

The federal government’s response? Release emergency reserves, drawing down a buffer that was already dangerously thin. Lower fuel quality standards for sixty days so higher-sulphur fuel can be blended into domestic supply. And tell people not to panic buy.

Chris Bowen described the situation as a national crisis. On that much, at least, he’s right.

We’ve been here before. We just keep making the same mistake over again.

What makes the fuel crisis so maddening is not that it happened. It’s that we were warned - explicitly, repeatedly, and by virtually every credible institution in the country - and did nothing.

In 2019, the National Oil Supplies Emergency Committee ran a classified exercise simulating a gradually escalating conflict in the Strait of Hormuz that led to severe fuel shortages in Australia. Not a vaguely adjacent scenario. This exact one. The 2014–15 Senate inquiry into transport energy resilience examined the same risk in public. The Lowy Institute, ASPI, the Australia Institute, the NRMA, and the Maritime Union all sounded the alarm, over and over, for the better part of a decade.

COVID gave us a dress rehearsal. The Ukraine war gave us another. And still we arrived at 2026 with the same thin reserves, the same import dependency, and the same absence of a credible plan.

As the Lowy Institute wrote this month: this was entirely predictable and comprehensively predicted. The missing element is political will. I’d put it more bluntly. The missing element is seriousness.

Fuel is just the beginning

Here’s what should worry us more than the queue at the petrol station. Fuel is not the only thing Australia has outsourced to the point of strategic vulnerability. It is simply the most visible.

In 2021, China restricted exports of urea - a key component of AdBlue, the diesel exhaust fluid that modern trucks need to run. Almost overnight, Australia faced the prospect of shutting down its national road transport fleet. Supermarket deliveries, fuel distribution, agricultural logistics - all of it was days away from grinding to a halt because we had no sovereign manufacturing capacity for a single chemical input. The government scrambled, sourced emergency urea from Indonesia, and the crisis passed. Incitec Pivot, the one domestic facility capable of producing it, announced it was closing anyway because it couldn’t secure an affordable long-term gas supply. In an energy-exporting nation. Let that sink in.

And now the same vulnerability has returned. The current crisis has disrupted global urea supply chains again, with the Middle East accounting for roughly two-thirds of Australia’s urea imports. Trucking executives are warning that a full AdBlue shortage could cascade across the economy within thirty days. The same crisis, from the same structural failure, that we supposedly learned from five years ago.

COVID exposed the same pattern in pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. When the pandemic hit, Australia discovered it could not manufacture enough surgical masks because the non-woven polypropylene needed to make them was produced by only a handful of firms worldwide. Medical supplies became scarce. Pharmaceutical imports were disrupted. We renewed discussions about sovereign capability, supply chain diversification, and economic security. But those discussions faded.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford

If COVID taught us anything, it should have been that you cannot outsource sovereignty and expect to get it back in a hurry. Instead, the only lesson that seems to have stuck is that governments can swoop in with temporary fixes - emergency procurement, short-term subsidies, hastily assembled taskforces (so many task forces) - and survive the news cycle long enough for the public to move on. That’s not a sovereignty fix.

ASPI has been making this point for years: national resilience cannot be measured solely in defence spending or military capability. It also depends on the stability of supply chains that sustain everyday life. Fuel, fertiliser, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing inputs. These are not separate policy domains. They are all expressions of the same question: can Australia sustain itself when push comes to shove?

Right now, the answer is no.

Both sides let this happen

Between 2013 and 2022, under Coalition governments, five Australian coastal petroleum tankers were pulled from service as refineries shut down. The Coalition effectively offshored our strategic fuel reserves, spending public money storing fuel overseas rather than building sovereign stockpiles on Australian soil. And when refinery after refinery closed, the response from Canberra was a shrug and a faith statement about the efficiency of global supply chains.

Labor has been in government since 2022. They have not rebuilt refining capacity. They have not met the 90-day IEA obligation. They entered this crisis without a plan for a Middle East oil shock, despite having access to intelligence briefings and intimate knowledge of the unfolding situation. Chris Bowen’s crisis management has amounted to reserve drawdowns, regulatory relaxation, and messaging discipline.

Neither side has clean hands. And the Australian public knows it.

The critical minerals comparison

What makes Australia’s failure on fuel, fertiliser, and pharmaceutical security so galling is that we already know what serious strategic policy looks like, because we’ve done it on critical minerals.

On critical minerals, Australia identified the threat of sole-source reliance on China, formed multilateral partnerships with the EU and others, built cooperative relationships with industry, deployed price support mechanisms, and negotiated trade agreements to secure long-term supply. It was methodical, bipartisan, and grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of risk. The Lowy Institute has drawn the contrast directly: the decisive action on critical minerals could not be more different from the fair-weather approach to fuel security.

We treated critical minerals as a strategic asset. We treated fuel as a commodity that would always be cheap and available. We treated pharmaceutical supply as someone else’s problem. We treated urea manufacturing as unviable and let the last plant close. One of those bets paid off. The rest are why we’re counting days of supply and hoping the next tanker arrives.

No one’s doing the grunt work

Here’s what frustrates me most about this debate. It’s been captured by the same tired ideological trench warfare that paralyses every energy conversation in this country. One side blames renewables. The other side blames fossil fuel dependence. And while they fight about the electricity grid, no one is doing the boring, unglamorous, strategically critical work of securing the supply chains that actually keep the country running.

Diesel, petrol, jet fuel, urea, pharmaceutical inputs - our dependency on these is not going away in the next decade. The energy transition is real, but so is the world we live in today. A world where Australia uses more energy from diesel alone than from electricity. Where diesel powers the trucks that move food, the machinery that harvests crops, and the generators that back up hospitals. Sovereignty means dealing with the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.

Where to from here?

This crisis should be a turning point. Not because it’s surprising (it was predicted by virtually every serious policy body in the country) but because it strips away every comfortable assumption about globalisation, cheap imports, and strategic complacency.

What would a serious response look like? It would start with recognising that sovereignty is not a single-issue problem. It is not enough to fix fuel and leave fertiliser, pharmaceuticals, and chemical manufacturing to the same drift that got us here. A UNSW roundtable this month recommended a national supply chain risk and resilience assessment, updated annually, and a permanent coordination mechanism linking government, industry, and regulators. ASPI has called for a broader resilience strategy encompassing the full network of imports, domestic production, and infrastructure. The Australian Institute of International Affairs has proposed a federal Office of National Economic Resilience.

On fuel specifically, we need to rebuild domestic refining capacity, or at the very least, secure guaranteed regional refining access with partners like South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. We need to mandate onshore fuel reserves that actually meet the 90-day IEA minimum, not the creative accounting that lets us pretend we’re close. We need regional fuel security partnerships. And we need to stop pretending that a country propping up its last two refineries with government payments is in anything resembling a position of strength.

None of this is radical. All of it is overdue.

Air Vice Marshal John Blackburn warned about this in 2013. He warned again in 2019. He warned again two months ago. The 2019 classified exercise simulated this exact crisis. Engineers Australia laid out a blueprint for action a decade ago. Every credible institution with a view on the subject has said the same thing, in different words, for years.

Sovereignty means being able to feed, fuel, and defend your own country when the world turns hostile. Right now, Australia cannot do that. Not with fuel. Not with fertiliser. Not with pharmaceuticals. Not with the chemical inputs that keep our trucks on the road.

The question for Albanese, for Taylor, and for all of us is whether this crisis produces real reform. Or whether we go back to sleep the moment prices drop, the way we did after every other crisis.

Because if a blockade on the other side of the world can empty your local servo in a fortnight, you’re not a sovereign nation. You’re a customer. And customers don’t get to set the terms.