last week accused petrol retailers of price gouging<\/a>, said panic buying was now putting pressure on supply, creating a vicious cycle that was only making the situation worse.<\/p>\n\u201cAs Australians, we can help by not panic buying,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we\u2019re also saying to the oil companies, let\u2019s ensure that the supply chains are working \u2026 starting from the terminal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government on Tuesday afternoon held an emergency meeting of a rapidly assembled taskforce that brought together peak farming, transport and fuel bodies alongside four federal ministers.<\/p>\n
The group committed to working together to share information and identify emerging issues, and at its first meeting recognised that while there had been some supply chain pressures in regional areas, the country\u2019s fuel supply remained stable.<\/p>\n
Peter Jones, the interim executive director of the Motor Trades Association of Australia, said some regional and rural service stations simply could not replenish their stocks quickly enough to meet the surge in demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s plenty of petrol in the country, but [it\u2019s] designed to be distributed in normal circumstances,\u201d said Jones, who is also the president of the Victorian Automotive Chamber of Commerce.<\/p>\n
Jones said panic buying had \u201cactually changed a market dynamic\u201d, which was amplified in the country because of the time it took to get fuel there, creating a serious situation for farmers who relied on diesel.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a tyranny of distance,\u201d he said. \u201cThe other thing is \u2026 that some of the independent [service stations] are running out because if they don\u2019t have a contract with one of the big oil companies, they may be going to the back of the list when it comes to being resupplied.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones said independent petrol stations that had \u201carrangements\u201d with big oil companies to supply them with fuel, rather than formal contracts mandating a certain volume, may not be able to request a top-up like they usually would.<\/p>\n
He urged people to buy their fuel as they normally would, and to be respectful of service station staff amid reports of some customers being abusive or aggressive \u201cwhen there is no fuel or the prices are much higher than they expected\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jones said a sharp drop overnight in the price of crude oil was promising but attempting to predict how long the conflict would last \u2013 and whether prices would rise again \u2013 was like \u201ctrying to put darts in a moving dartboard\u201d.<\/p>\n
Growing community friction around the availability and price of fuel comes as an analyst at CBA said the US-Israel war on Iran would last for months, not weeks.<\/p>\n
The global benchmark oil price, Brent crude, traded at a little over US$70 at the end of February, but spiked as high as US$118 at the start of this week before Donald Trump signalled a possible end to the war by saying America\u2019s military objectives were \u201cpretty much complete\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Brent crude price fell significantly after the US president\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n
Oil fetched just shy of US$93 a barrel on Tuesday afternoon, according to Bloomberg, up about 30% in March.<\/p>\n
Madison Cartwright, CBA\u2019s senior geoeconomics analyst, predicted the conflict \u201cwill continue to escalate from here, despite recent comments\u201d by Trump.<\/p>\n
That means Australians may need to get used to fuel prices well in excess of $2 a litre, pushing the weekly fuel bill for the average household towards a record high of $75, according to AMP\u2019s chief economist, Shane Oliver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Regional service stations are struggling to replenish fuel supplies left empty by panic buying that has seen demand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-467754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}