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In its response to this global fuel crisis, the Coalition has picked up the Trump administration’s fervent cry of “Drill, baby, drill.” The most appropriate response should be: “Think, baby, THINK!”

We pride ourselves on being a clever country, with abundant natural resources, a generally first-class education and training system, a global reputation for leading medical and scientific research and technology development. We are quick adopters of technology, with a highly trained workforce and an effective access to capital.

So why don’t we think for ourselves about how to better utilise these capacities in our national interest? That’s surely better than mindlessly following the United States, with its increasingly isolationist, self-interested president. His anti-science, anti-empirical, historically ignorant, prejudice-riddled thinking is leading to the worst possible outcomes. He seems obsessed with his standing in the pages of history and his financial enrichment, while ignoring even catastrophic economic and geopolitical consequences.

Australia is well on the way with a green energy plan that should effectively transition us away from fossil fuels. There will be opportunities to rekindle manufacturing industries in Australia, but a protectionist approach will only disadvantage us in the longer term. We must curb our enthusiasm for a manufacturing renaissance, as China and other Asian countries have established a strong and probably sustainable competitive advantage, both in terms of the costs of production and in the control and application of relevant technologies.

It’s a national disgrace that successive governments of both persuasions have failed to think through and execute a national fuel strategy, and more broadly, an energy security strategy. It’s been an urgent challenge for some decades now, according to multiple defence and strategic reviews, independent research bodies, royal commissions and parliamentary committee reports – and these warnings have been ignored. We have consistently failed to convert risk identification into meaningful action and preparedness.

Energy security underpins our national security, and bipartisanship on it is fundamental. Yet cheap, short-term, point-scoring politics have triumphed over energy policy all along, leaving us exposed. Now we face a fuel crisis arising from US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war in the Middle East. It is quickly shaping up as a broader “forever war”, with mission creep taking hold as justifications change from press conference to press conference, and depending on who is doing the talking.

I must also say how disappointed I have been in the responses of both the government and the current opposition to this war. What was urgently needed was an outright condemnation of US–Israeli actions – which were undertaken without any clear, honest statement of the reasons and objectives, or any recognition of the consequences for global power balances and peace aspirations, or thought for the impacts on the world economy and sharemarkets. A line must be drawn on Trump’s mercurial geopolitical follies.

In regards to nuclear weapons, collective action is essential to restricting proliferation, but this hope is all but lost given the number of countries that have now developed such capacity. It is so easy to forget it was the Eisenhower administration that initiated Iran’s nuclear program – in the hope of counterbalancing others around the globe. Former US president Barack Obama’s agreement with Iran, dumped by his successor, provided the necessary elements of control. But why just focus on Iran, when nations such as Pakistan, Israel and India have a nuclear capacity largely unsupervised – with Saudi Arabia developing an alliance with Pakistan for access – not to mention the US, Russia, China, France and other world powers.

It is unfortunate that our governments have so often failed to think longer-term and strategically. This shortcoming is often dismissed as a consequence of the three-year federal parliaments, but it is more a fundamental structural weakness in our thinking. Planning has become a dirty word in our politics, which has tended to rely on market forces, rather than interventionist government action. With such great global uncertainty, though, surely it is only common sense to think ahead, to assess risks and attempt to minimise the effects of shocks?

John Blackburn, the former deputy chief of the Royal Australian Air Force and now a fuel security expert, has written several articles and reviews of our parlous energy security. He has done extensive media interviews and briefed both major parties on recommendations to help address the issue. His advice has mostly been ignored.

The key conclusion in one of his early articles was that “the situation we are in is the result of wilful blindness of both sides of politics over the past 14 years, despite repeated attempts to get them to ‘wake up’.”

Based on his specific experience with cybersecurity, the pandemic and defence logistics – where we have similarly failed to prepare adequately – Blackburn is now calling for a Senate inquiry on national resilience and preparedness. Instead of the detailed thinking needed to tackle complex challenges, we have been left with superficiality and partial solutions. Speaking of our liquid fuel security in 2021, Blackburn summarised the situation as “too little, too late, and too short-sighted”, with governments from both sides of politics really only acting in response to crises, rather than preparing for foreseeable disruptions.

One example is from September 2020, with the impending closure of the country’s last four oil refineries. The Morrison government finally responded to the fuel insecurity, but the response was too little, too late and definitely too short-sighted. Only two of those refineries agreed to accept support contracts that would keep them open until 2027. The solution pushed the issue off the agenda for the next election but left the country in the exposed position that has become so critical today.

Australia’s fuel supply resilience isn’t just inadequate – we don’t have a proper national systematic risk analysis tested by industry experts. Australia’s combined dependency on crude and fuel imports for transport and defence purposes has grown from about 60 per cent in 2000 to more than 90 per cent today. Our “just in time” oil and liquid fuel supply chains work well enough under normal circumstances, or during small-scale disruptions, but the resilience of those supply chains and associated infrastructure under a wider range of plausible scenarios has not been assessed. We hold no publicly owned fuel stocks, we don’t mandate any storage requirements on oil and fuel refiners and importers, and we don’t meet the stock-holding levels set by the terms of our International Energy Agency membership.

The 2015 Senate inquiry into transport energy resilience and sustainability called for a whole-of-government risk assessment of our fuel supply, availability and vulnerability. This assessment was to consider “the vulnerabilities in Australia’s fuel supply to possible disruptions resulting from military actions, acts of terrorism, natural disasters, industrial accidents and financial and other structural dislocation”.

This, of course, was never done. Another recommendation, for the government to require all fuel supply companies to report their stocks, was eventually implemented in 2018. A third, that the government publish a comprehensive plan aimed at achieving a secure, affordable and sustainable transport energy supply, has been ignored.

Neither the COVID-19 Response Inquiry of 2024, nor the Senate Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Resilience in 2022, addressed the full spectrum of national resilience as a systemic issue – an interconnected web of critical national systems upon which our sovereignty depends.

The current war-induced disruption to oil transport through the Strait of Hormuz is the kind of predictable, high-consequence event that Australia’s fuel security analysts have been warning about for more than a decade. It has exposed fundamental vulnerabilities across multiple critical systems simultaneously: liquid fuel supply, defence operational readiness, freight and logistics, agricultural inputs, and the broader economy. An appropriately designed national resilience framework would have been able to anticipate and manage the cascading nature of the shock.

In addition to another Senate inquiry – for which Blackburn has circulated draft terms of reference – I suggest a couple of other political initiatives. First, initiate a national discussion with the miners, farmers (including the likes of Grains Australia) and transport and logistics industries to agree on their prospective storage requirements and preferred locations for the storage – be it, say, in the Pilbara, in major grain-growing areas, or transport hubs.

Second, start national discussions in relation to the development of renewable fuels to lead to detail of an effective strategy. Australia has a very real opportunity to develop renewable fuels, with significant export potential. Certainly, ethanol for further blending with unleaded refined petrol (not just E10, but even E50 or other variants), biodiesel as a direct substitute for fossil diesel and a range of aviation fuels. Cane growers looking for an alternative income stream amid volatile sugar prices could provide the industrial base.

This would require some rethinking by the current opposition, given their ridiculous negativity towards renewables and the dishonesty of their rhetoric. The deliverable technological solutions usually have a strong regional dimension, such as the recycling of organic agricultural waste – a complete circular economy solution, with the digestate returned to the farm as a type of fertiliser.

In short, we need to champion our thinkers. There are precious few to be found while the National Party continues to put ideology ahead of its constituents’ best interests, and the Liberals simply race One Nation to the bottom.

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