Petrol price graph<\/a><\/p>\nRetail prices for households and businesses were set to stay at their near-record highs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, which Khoury blamed on stations that jacked up prices early in the conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are now in a permanent high point \u2026 in those three cities,\u201d Khoury said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opportunity to crack down on that behaviour and just get them to, at the very least, hold their price \u2013 we missed it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unleaded petrol prices surpassed 230 cents a litre in Darwin on Friday and in Melbourne on Sunday, and were continuing to approach the mark in other capital cities, according to Informed Sources data.<\/p>\n
Shortages had also hit urban retailers, with a 7-Eleven in Canberra running out of fuel over the weekend. Customers at the Holt store were told the shortage was due to sudden bulk-buying, with restocks continuing on schedule and expected on Monday night.<\/p>\n
Another 7-Eleven in Canberra\u2019s Phillip has been running low, with customers told stocks could run out by Monday evening.<\/p>\n
\u2018Serious dysfunction\u2019<\/p>\n
Calls for stronger interventions have grown as shortages hit more towns. The NSW government held crisis talks with fuel suppliers and key industries on Monday, when industry bodies agreed to share more information with the government so fuel could go where it was most needed.<\/p>\n
The president of NSW Farmers, Xavier Martin, who attended Monday\u2019s roundtable, said food production was at risk as \u201cserious dysfunction\u201d left farmers, villages and towns without fuel.<\/p>\n
\u201cTractors and trucks run on diesel not petrol, and there\u2019s been this huge focus on petrol \u2026 those harvesters need thousands of litres a day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stuart King, the Swan Hill rural city council mayor, said Robinvale was full of temporary workers for the wine grape and almond harvest season, who were travelling up to 100km daily to get to farms.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you haven\u2019t got fuel, you can run out pretty quickly, which means then you can\u2019t get to work,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n
Shortages had spilled over to other small towns while stations in the regional city of Swan Hill had blocked people from filling up jerry cans or mobile fuel tanks, King said.<\/p>\n
King called for the fuel excise to be cut, as it was in 2022, saying prices in his area had risen 30% in a fortnight. He said he had heard from locals who had put off trips to visit family in Melbourne and were forced to drop out of the town\u2019s major winter sport leagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve spoken to some young people over the weekend and they\u2019re saying \u2026 \u2018I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be able to afford the travel and I\u2019m already stretched as it is, so I might just work on Saturdays instead of playing sports,\u2019\u201d King said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat then becomes a cumulative effect on community wellbeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Surging prices are set to have the biggest impact on the lowest-income households, which spend about 10% of their income on petrol, according to analysis by the e61 Institute.<\/p>\n
However, a fuel excise cut would deliver bigger benefits to high-income households, which buy nearly two times as much as the lowest-earning fifth of Australians but are more insulated from higher prices. The federal government has also ruled out excise changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dozens of service stations across Australia have run out of petrol as distributors struggle to keep up with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-543766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}