Petrol prices fuelling anger in retail politics
DECADES of poor leadership.
It doesn’t matter what side of politics you follow – we’ve been shafted on many things – but when it comes to fuel price gouging, it’s so obvious yet unrelenting.
There’s been plenty of window dressing to try to deflect public anger. In 2008, former prime minister Kevin Rudd appointed, at great cost and media fanfare, the nation’s first “petrol commissioner”, who was given the sole responsibility of monitoring and investigating petrol price gouging and collusion.
I wonder what he did for his bloated taxpayer salary.
No prior or subsequent government, Labor or Liberal, has done any better.
By the way, has anyone noticed how bad the quality of the petrol and diesel is these days compared with a few decades ago?
It’s so bad there are plenty of tales of unwitting motorists spending thousands of their own dollars fixing up engines after getting a “bad” batch of fuel.
That doesn’t stop the fuel companies pouring the gas on price hikes, so we’re copping it two ways.
International oil prices plummet – and prices at the pump stay the same for weeks and we’re told it’s all the oil in the system that was purchased at that higher price.
International oil prices rise – and prices at the bowser can skyrocket overnight. The global transportation system apparently has erratic periods of overwhelming efficiency. Oil companies love a crisis. Covid-19 gave them a great excuse to blame supply chains, logistics and a lower demand to increase the price at the pump, now the war between Russia and Ukraine has delivered these transnationals yet more excuses to put on the squeeze.
My first job as a kid was pumping petrol at Dad’s Amoco servo in Shepparton when super was 24 cents a gallon (about five cents per litre).
We were discounting at eight cents off per gallon and an independent servo in town (John the Cheap) was discounting at 13 cents off – “He won’t last long”, Dad said when we drove past one morning.
I’d stand on an upside-down milk crate to wash windscreens and check the oil and water, all included in the price of five cents a litre.
Now we’re paying more than $2 a litre (close to $10 per imperial gallon) and it’s costing a lot of locals at least $150 to fill up their cars, a far cry from me as a kid putting $2 in for young blokes who rolled up in their XW351 GTS and HK Monaros.
Whatever the reasons for these current price rises – and a small portion of them may be justified – we as a nation are being ripped off billions upon billions each and every year by a corporatocracy that has so many spider webs extending into government via their high-priced lobbyists that we’re powerless to do anything about it while we only have a choice between two parties.
No wonder there seems to be such a current mood for change to do away with the two-party system that in so many ways has not served us well.