Andrew Chuter, a public and active transport campaigner and Socialist Alliance activist, warns that the federal Labor government’s decision to temporarily halve the fuel excise and cut the heavy vehicle road user charge to zero for three months may worsen the impact of the Iran war fuel crisis.

“At a time when there’s an oil shortage, you want to find alternative ways of getting people moving people and freight around — preferably on public transport or electrified rail freight and other methods. What the government has just done does not make any sense.”

Theoretically, halving the fuel excise should mean save drivers 26.3 cents on the cost of a litre of petrol. However, Chuter said, going on past experience there is no guarantee that the oil companies will fully pass this cut on to consumers.

“They generally like to ramp up their prices and make super profits at times like this. We’ve seen price gouging happen already in the current shortage.

“We also saw this during the oil shortages at the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine. At that time, United States oil companies made huge super profits. The US is relatively cushioned from global oil shortages, because it has its own supplies. The super profits that it made at that time from unnecessarily raising prices were vast.

“The big oil companies use these incidents as excuses to raise prices. They may pass on a little bit of the fuel excise cut but there’s no guarantee that they will pass on the full 26 cents.”

The Australian Institute has calculated that state and federal governments provided $16.3 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users in 2025-26.

This is a huge handout to some of the biggest and most profitable companies that has slowed the shift to renewable energy that might have cushioned the country from this latest “oil shock”.

“The price of electrifying transport has dropped incredibly and it is forecast to continue to drop further as wind and solar energy collection increases in efficiency,” Chuter said.

“The technology is getting better. Battery storage is getting better. These things are the future and are vastly cheaper. But these fossil fuel subsidies lock us into the past and lock us into the more expensive solutions.

“Companies that want to invest in renewable and sustainable forms of energy are looking for a stable pathway but all the public funding is going towards fossil fuels, there's less incentive to develop alternatives.

“So we have progressed a lot more slowly and, as a result, we are paying the price in this latest oil crisis. 

“We should have electrified up to about 50% of cars by now; if we had started taking action earlier that would certainly have cushioned this current oil shock.

“There are tons of subsidies that encourage road freight – which really should be on rail. Studies show, year after year, that it’s much more efficient to move the vast bulk of our road freight to rail. It’s much more energy efficient.

“Currently a lot of rail freight is run on diesel. But it’s still far more efficient to move freight at a continuous velocity rather than by trucks, having to stop and start. But it could, and should, also be electrified especially close to the city where we don’t want diesel fumes poisoning millions of people.

“We would be a lot further along that line if we hadn’t wasted so much money on massive motorways such as WestConnex — the primary justification for which was more road freight.”

Chuter said the NSW Labor government’s refusal to making public transport free, like Victoria and Tasmania, for the next month or so was “really pigheaded”.

“NSW Premier Chris Minns has really stuck his head in the sand on this one. The 50 cent public transport fares in Queensland were started under the former Labor government, but have continued under the Liberal National Party because it is such a success. Public transport usage has increased.

“As a result, Victoria and Tasmania quickly made public transport temporarily free to address the fuel crisis. That’s fantastic,” said Chuter. “The Rail, Tram and Bus Union managed to extract fair-free days during its enterprise bargaining industrial action. During those periods, a lot more people were catching public transport.

“Public transport is a vastly more efficient way for people in cities to move around, and it saves us fuel.

“It saves us financially and the economic benefits of that are significant. Also there is less pollution, less fossil fuel use, and more fossil fuels left over for the essential functions that can't get off fossil fuels.”

On the issue of West Papua, which I’m involved with, Green Left has consistently highlighted over the years the ongoing human rights abuses committed by the security forces in the territory ... issues not always covered by the mainstream media.

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