As I said, stop whingeing, and be grateful that you have been able to waste an extremely valuable chemical resource in doing so little so cheaply for so long. Get rid of your old Falcon. Buy a $245 motor that you can strap on your push-bike (now advertised in Just Bikes, the motorcycle magazine), buy a push-bike from your local tip-shop for about $10, strap on the motor, and use that for commuting. Tell your kids that like I used to they can cycle the 5km to their school, or catch a bus. It will get them off their fat little bottoms and get them fit. And tell your politicians to build cycleways, not freeways, and that they should make damn sure that public transport works.That's for the townies who read this column.

If you are in the bush and you definitely need an appropriate petrol/diesel vehicle, tell the townies to get off their butts and stop wasting petrol in commuting to work over the same old route every day; public transport is their way to go. Or bicycle, motorised or not.

Your whingeing will make no difference to the price of petrol. We are hitting peak oil, and that's that.

The reason that gas has gone up in price is because oil has gone
up in price. The price of the two is linked, its all energy.

The thing is, the easy oil has been discovered and largely used,
especially with China, India and other developing countries, using
more all the time.

There is still oil and gas to be discovered, but costs are huge.
I fool around a bit with oil shares so am aware of some of the costs.

As they go deeper and more offshore, costs rise further. Those
rigs can cost half a million a day to rent. One hole they drilled
recently, 25$ million to drill it, it was dry. That is fairly
common these days and those costs have to be recouped somewhere,
or nobody will bother drilling.

Yes, we now have technology to drill, where we never drilled
before, but its hugely expensive and complicated. That is all
reflected at the petrol station.

Henry you remind me why I find some conservationists not worth listening to.
Yes we are short of oil, maybe we are past peak oil, we do not know for sure.
Let our suburban brothers tell me what they are going to eat if country Australia can not afford fuel.
Dream on about bikes if you want but it is silly to think like that.
Why must we use petrol if we have something else Henry?
Now as oil price rises profits do too 10% of $110 a barrel is more than 10% of last years prices.
Tax too is the same thing, reduce tax's say the few conservationists who think this country is its city's and we will only use more.
They will only tax us more on something else say others.
Fuel prices impact on every thing we buy and the very lives of country people.
No trips to town unless youu must for some.
Apathy is evident here right here in this thread easter comes and fuel will spike to see holiday makers pay even more coastal country towns will drop for a few eeks any discounts in place and apathy wins.
We are not looking for new fuels as fast as we can.
LPG for a while is cheaper and could fill a gap ,but in time it will be taxed more too.

Belly, I am far from a conservationist. I have made a living for a long life and in many countries in a profession conservationists and greenies see as causing rape and pillage across the globe. Simply get used to the fact that they ain't making oil no more and what is left will be increasingly hard and correspondingly expensive to find. We can use vegie oil; we have oil shales; we have coal; we can turn food into ethanol (which is why the price of bread is rising and maybe the good old third world will have to suffer a little more starvation on our behalf). We can easily keep that old Falcon of yours trundling along at ever-increasing expense to you and we can keep on adding CO2 to the atmosphere in doing so. BUT Australia has 80% of its population in towns, 60% of whom trundle back and forwards to work on the same old road, every day, in the same old car, one to a car, causing all sorts of problems and demanding we waste our taxes on freeways when we need the money for hospitals and schools. Now that is silly, and it is wasteful and it adds to the cost of fuel. The OPEC cartel will not drop the price of oil because they know it's a once-used resource and they need the revenue to do things for the poor in Venezuela, squander on wives and fornication in Saudi Arabia, and perhaps build an infrastructure that means that when oil runs out they have something other than sand to live on. Personally, I LOVE my car.But I'd like to see us move to a hydrogen economy and save oil for ball-bearings and fertiliser and recyclable plastics. So stop BELLYaching and re-assess your transport needs.

Henry in that south American country petrol is 14 cents USA a gallon! and it is smuggled into the next country to be sold for twice that.
My intent was not to denie oil is running out.
But to ask why are we paying so much.
Yes OPEC try to control both supply and price.
But tax has a higher impact on what we pay than barrel prices.
IF today some one invented a brand new fuel, say it was water, and it worked better than petrol.
First would the western world let us use it? the overnight impact on oil would nearly bankrupt millions.
Say they said ok use it soon it would be taxed as much as oil.
yes we need new fuels yes oil will not last forever but do you truly think we can maintain our standard of living while peddling 20 million push bikes?
And let reality shine for a while ,surely you understand not every car is only used to commute?
Australia's tourist industry's would be dead without private transport.

Belly,
We are paying for the desperate search for more oil.
The oil companies know that their business as it is now has no long
term future. That is why they are engaging in takeovers and share
buybacks.
If anything we should increase the tax, but only if the extra was put
into public transport, railways etc.

An increased tax would enforce conservation of our supply.
Australia is in deep doo doo with our small production and large demand.
When it hits the fan we will be like "Please sir can I have some more ?

It has already pushed our trade balance into the red and with our
production depleting fast and the import price going up it can only
get one hell of a lot worse.
We should start a change to LPG but that will cost really big money
to change the whole fleet. It should only be done if we stop export
of natural gas and do not make LPG from oil.
That done we will have a considerable time to move to a new fuel
regime which will have to be done at some period in the future.